Spooks Run Wild (Phil Rosen, 1941)

Spooks Run Wild is a bad movie, a horror-comedy neither scary nor funny, a cheap production that, intentionally or not, saved money on film and lighting equipment by arranging the characters side by side in the majority of shots and letting some scenes play out in indiscernible darkness. Nevertheless, there's an endearing quality to the cheapness and incompetence, and I am never going to be mad about Bela Lugosi and Angelo Rossitto doing their thing in a spooky mansion. Still, I can only recommend this one to the hardcore Lugosi-heads.

I also feel some affection for the movie because scenes from it appeared in Horrible Horror, a VHS compilation of b-movie sci-fi and horror clips and trailers from the '30s through the '60s hosted by Zacherley, "the Cool Ghoul," which I received as a Christmas gift in fifth or sixth grade and watched at least 800 times. I already talked about that VHS compilation in my King of the Zombies post in April. (I claimed to have watched it 37,000 times in that post, but I've gotta come clean. It's closer to 800.) I was never able to properly learn geometry because so many scenes from Horrible Horror took up permanent residence in my brain. There was simply no room to introduce any trapezoid knowledge without evicting the trailer for The Alligator Man, and I wasn't going to let that happen ("I'll kill you, alligator man! Just like I'd kill any four-legged gator!").

Spooks Run Wild brings together Bela Lugosi (bounced from Hollywood to the Poverty Row circuit when his drug and alcohol problems became a studio liability) and the wisecracking, streetwise East Side Kids, who may need an introduction in 2026. In 1935, a Broadway play called Dead End, about Depression-era New York City street kids getting a second chance in reform school, became a huge hit. Hollywood producers saw dollar signs and turned the play into a movie. The movie was a hit, too, and the cast of young men became a '30s Hollywood franchise called the Dead End Kids (after a two-film rebranding as the Crime School Kids), with the series of movies quickly evolving from gritty dramas to goofy comedies of misadventure. Some of the original Dead End Kids appeared in their own imitation group, the Little Tough Guys, who had a similar run of movies from the late '30s into the early '40s. In 1940, low-budget Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures got in on the action and created a copycat gang called the East Side Kids. Eventually, some of the Dead End Kids became East Side Kids after the Hollywood output slowed, and the trend continued in the low-budget world into the '50s, with the East Side Kids morphing into the Bowery Boys in the late '40s. By the time the last Bowery Boys movie hit theaters in the late '50s, the scoreboard tallied one Broadway play, 89 films, and three serials, not even including other copycat ensembles such as the Gas House Kids and the Harlem Tuff Kids. Yowzah!

In Spooks Run Wild, the East Side Kids play a group of underprivileged NYC teens (though the youngest of them looks to be in at least his mid-twenties) on their way to a character-building wilderness camp in upstate New York (filmed on Monogram's sets in Los Angeles), under the supervision of engaged couple Jeff Dixon (Dave O'Brien), a condescending pipe-smoking law student, and Linda Mason (Dorothy Short), a plucky can-do nurse. Linda's too good for milquetoast dweeb Jeff, but what can you do? (O'Brien and Short were a real-life married couple, and they also acted together in Reefer Madness.) Jeff and Linda are the only characters with run-of-the-mill names (no offense to the Jeffs and Lindas of the world), with the exception of East Sider Danny (Bobby Jordan). The rest of our East Side gang includes Muggs (Leo Gorcey), Glimpy (Huntz Hall), Scruno (Sunshine Sammy Morrison, also a former Our Gang cast member), Peewee (David Gorcey, Leo's younger brother), and Skinny (Donald Haines).

When the bus driver transporting our characters stops in a small town near the camp to take a break and check the tires, the Kids play a prank on the driver, get yelled at by pipe-smokin' Jeff, and wander off to a soda counter, where they hit on the clerk Margie (Rosemary Portia) and hear a radio alert about a serial murderer on the run in the area. They brush it off, but the tough-guy act fails to convince.

Back at the camp and bedding down for the night, the Kids decide to sneak out and meet up with Margie. Their route will take them through a cemetery. Much of this will be too dark to see. It's like watching a radio play in certain scenes, I tell ya. Meanwhile, an odd man with the fantastic name of Nardo (Bela Lugosi) and his little person assistant Luigi (Angelo Rossitto) stop at a gas station for directions to an abandoned creepy mansion Nardo has inherited. The horror-obsessed gas station owner Lem Harvey (P.J. Kelly) knows he's looking at the murderer, but he plays it cool. He also recognizes his next customer, Dr. Von Grosch (Dennis Moore), from his occult reading material. The doctor tells Lem to keep his identity secret because he's on Nardo's trail.

Back to our dimly lit late-night wanderings. When Peewee gets hit with buckshot by a spooked cemetery caretaker who's already witnessed Nardo and Luigi disappear in front of his eyes, the other Kids carry him to Nardo's spooky mansion for help. Spooky stuff that's not that spooky occurs. Comedy that's not that funny also occurs, but I do love the way Lugosi says "Helloooo" and "Gooodbyyyye" and the way a skull prop bounces off his head during a pratfall.

The movie picks up whenever Lugosi and Rossitto are onscreen, and Kelly and Morrison also get a few decent moments, but this is otherwise pretty generic stuff, mostly poorly done, though even the weakest 20th century movie increases in interest for me the deeper we descend into our 21st century big tech hell. I also got a laugh out of the lack of urgency Jeff and the local constable show for the missing fish-out-of-water East Side Kids and Linda (who went off to look for the gang when Jeff was more interested in smoking his pipe and uttering condescending dismissals of Linda's concern) while a twisted serial murderer is roaming the same stretch of countryside. These guys do not want to get out of their chairs.

Well, there you have it. Spooks Run Wild. It's a movie (barely), but there aren't many spooks, and they could have run a whole lot wilder. I'll leave you with some Nebraska talk. Almost everyone in the East Side Kids cast was a native New Yorker except for Morrison (from New Orleans) and Haines, who hailed from my home state of Nebraska. He was born in Seward County, but his family moved to southern California when he was eight in search of work. He became a successful child actor beginning in the silent era, and Spooks Run Wild was his final movie. Enlisting in the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Haines was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. Though he was only 23 when he died, Haines had at least 92 film credits. Film production workdays can be pretty nuts, but movie people in the '20s, '30, and '40s worked freakishly inhuman schedules.

Keeping the Nebraska connections flowing, it's time for some Angelo Rossitto talk. Rossitto, whose acting career stretched from the silent film The Beloved Rogue in 1927 to a 1987 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (he died in 1991), was born and raised in Omaha. Some notable credits in his lengthy acting career (he also owned a Hollywood newsstand to keep a steady income going between acting gigs) include Seven Footprints to Satan, Freaks, The Wizard of Oz (he was one of the Munchkins), Hellzapoppin', Samson and Delilah, The Baron of Arizona, Confessions of an Opium Eater, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Trip, Brain of Blood (OK, that one may be notable only to me), The Other, a Rockford Files episode, the animated Lord of the Rings, The Dark, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind (filmed in the '70s and finally released in 2018), the front cover of Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones album, and the back cover of Bob Dylan & The Band's The Basement Tapes. Another wild Nebraska-related fact about Rossitto is that his granddaughter is married to my preschool teacher's oldest son who moved from Nebraska to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor but, Seinfeld episode aside, ended up building a career as a propmaker for movies and TV shows. I did some benign Internet stalking to see what he was up to after reading his mom's obituary in my hometown paper (she was a great preschool teacher, by the way, and a very nice woman). It looks like he's retired from the film industry now and teaching jiujitsu in Hawaii. Some people know how to live.