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Bowery Boys: Spook Busters [VHS]

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The movie begins as most of the Bowery Boys are graduating from the College of Insect Extermination. Sach (Huntz Hall), the dumbbell of the group, flunked out! When the recent graduates set up shop in Louie's Sweet Shop, they get a call from a real estate agent. An old mansion, located next to a cemetery, needs extermination work done in preparation for selling it. Although it's supposedly abandoned, a mad doctor and his henchmen are using the place to conduct bizarre experiments. When the boys arrive, the bad guys try to scare them off. Lights inexplicably go on and off, knives and hatchets are hurled at them, and a message on the mirror warns them to get out while they're still alive. As Slip (Leo Gorcey) explains, they're just having "optical delusions." Later, Sach is playing the organ, which causes the wall to spin around. This leads to a staircase down to the basement, where Sach discovers the doctor's operating room. Locked in a cage behind closed doors is a giant gorilla! The mad doctor wants to transplant Sach's brain into the body of the gorilla. That plot device was used again, to much better effect, in "The Bowery Boys Meet The Monsters." (Why that Bowery Boys film, their most commercially successful, has never been released on video is a mystery to me.) While the rest of the boys are trapped in the house, Dell (Gabriel Dell) manages to escape and get the cops. They return to rescue the gang and arrest the evil doctor and his henchmen. The poor gorilla, who escaped from his cage, is shot dead in the process. Talk about exterminating pests! Any description for this film that states, "The boys try to exterminate some spooks from a haunted house," is inaccurate. "Spook Busters" is similar to "Ghostbusters" in name only.

In 1946 the East Side Kids would change their name, for the final time, to the Bowery boys as Leo Gorcey would now become Muggs Mahoney as the leader of the gang. With the change the boys films would now become almost completely, three-stooges inspired, slapstick romps with little of the gritty drama of their East Side/Dead End kids days.

Spook Busters is the perfect example of a film that plays out like an extended Three Stooges short. The boys have just graduated college...well...actually they graduate from exterminator school and become professional exterminators. They get a call to clean up the pests at an old spooky house so it can be sold. Naturally nothing is that easy as the boys find a mad doctor and a gang of henchman are hiding out in the house and try their best to scare the boys off. Stealing another page from the Stooges, the mad doctor wants to put Sache's brain in th head of a gorilla. There are plenty of comedic spooky moments and sight gags in the movie and it's a fun comedy horror film.

When my brother and I were kids, our dad always watched Bowery Boys movies with us. Being, himself, a poor streets kid from Scranton, PA during pretty much the same era, he seemed to really connect with the flicks. This particular movie I remember enjoying thirty years ago, as I do today. It mixes the typical high jinx of all the Boys' movies with some innocuous monster movie spookiness. Great nostalgic fun for the adult, and great silly, G-rated fun for the kids.

Spook Busters features the Bowery Boys; several of the members are Dead End Kids all grown up. The leader of the gang is Slip (Leo Gorcey), a fella with a big personality. He manages the struggling exterminating business the boys have going, and when they get their first job, he jumps at the chance. Unfortunately, the house is rumored to be haunted, and it is, but not by ghosts. Some scientists are doing some secretive work inside- work that they don't want to be discovered.

Sach (Huntz Hall) acts as the clown, constantly getting into trouble. Gabe also provides the beautiful girl in the form of his wife, a French beauty (Tanis Chandler). The gags and the story of this film read like those from a short subject, but there are plenty of things to run the time to feature length. Sometimes it gets slow and predictable, but the personalities in the gang make it fun.