Spook Busters

Because this is an early Bowery Boys film, it features more than just Slip (Leo Gorcey) and Sach (Huntz Hall). Bobby Jordan and Whitey are on hand and the film is a better than average one for the team as a result. In the later films, any real pretense of a gang of friends is gone and it basically was the Slip & Sach Show...and the pictures were much more repetitive and less enjoyable.

The film begins with the boys graduating...from exterminator school. Soon they have their own insect extermination business and they are asked to take care of a creepy mansion that appears to be abandoned. But, there's actually a nutty scientist hiding in the basement doing experiments. At first he tries to scare away the boys but when he meets Sach he knows he'll be the perfect candidate for a brain transplant with gorilla!

Surprisingly enough, this enjoyable nonsense is pretty typical of a Bowery Boys film! The weird haunted house and brain transplant are both themes that would be repeated many times during the course of this franchise. It's very enjoyable if you like that sort of thing...and for others it might be a bit of a trial to get through this B-movie silliness.

Although the name of the film might give you the idea that it was the ancestor of the immensely successful Ghostbuster films of the Eighties, Spook Busters has the Bowery Boys get into the ghost business quite by accident.

Not that there are any real ghosts in Spook Busters, but the people where newly graduated exterminator Leo Gorcey has been hired to rid the place of six legged pests by the rental agent are keeping up the rumors it's a haunted house because of the experiments they're conducting. But when chief scientist Douglass Dumbrille takes one look at Huntz Hall, he decides Hall would be a grand subject for his latest experiment. What is that you say, why merely to exchange Hall's brain for that of a gorilla's and vice versa. Just the sort of stuff that movie mad scientists go around doing, though one does have to ask why.

Douglass Dumbrille who was one of film's best villains at both a serious and a comic one. He's best known for being the shyster lawyer Mr. Cedar in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. But in a comic vein we've seen him roll down a department store floor after The Marx Brothers in The Big Store and in an Indian suit after Lou Costello in Ride 'Em Cowboy. Dumbrille really enjoyed the comic villain roles and he looks like he's having an equally good time with the Bowery Boys as a mad scientist.

You can't expect too much from Monogram Pictures, but Spook Busters is a good example of the Bowery Boys and their shtick.

Slip's (Gorcey) candyshop exterminator co. (read the Bowery Boys) is called to a creepy old house where the boys meet real exterminators!

The best thing about this so-so entry are two stellar bad guys—Charles Middleton and Douglas Dumbrille. Middleton's a walking graveyard, while Dumbille's a leering madman. Together they menace Gorcey and Hall inside their old dark mansion (where else). Except Monogram appears to be paying Middleton by the word since he mostly stands around and nods—too bad because his voice of doom is enough to freeze a ranger battalion. Also, cheapjack Monogram confines the last 20 minutes to two meager sets, not exactly a treat for the eyes.

The movie manages a few chuckles, especially when the mad Dr. Coslow (Dumbrille) eyes Sach's moronic cranium like a slice of beefsteak, rare. Some choice dialog follows. But what's Gabe Dell's navy man doing in this knock-about. He reminds me of Zeppo of the Marx Bros. — the zanies' link to romance and the normal world, but also a drag on the humor. Note too the familiar face of Billy Benedict as gang member Whitey. I expect he kept the newspaper business alive during the 30's and 40's by hawking them from a thousand backlot street corners.

Anyway, it's a passable entry in the long-running series. But if you think you've seen it before, you probably have.

It's been theorized that SPOOK BUSTERS was the inspiration for the 1984 hit comedy GHOSTBUSTERS, and given that the titles of the two films are so similar, well ... it's possible. But the idea here of Leo Gorcey and his Bowery Boys buddies getting diplomas from exterminating school and setting out to open a business for terminating household pests is about as close as this gets to the latter movie. The show begins with some humorously mangled voice-over narration from Gorcey commenting on his graduation ("I was overwhelmed with commotion and there was a lunk in my throat"), and from there the chuckles slow down a bit. But what happens is the gang gets a gig to work at an old house that might be haunted, and the opportunity for VERY light comedy occurs when a scientist wants to put Sach's brain into a gorilla. There's a cute slow-motion fight sequence, but overall this is another typical entry of the day from Slip and the guys. Also making a reappearance from earlier movies is Gabriel Dell (as "Gabe") who returns from the Navy as a serious character and adds nothing. In future films Gabe would drift in and out of these comedies and be more like a pesky fly at a picnic. **1/2 out of ****

The Bowery Boys are graduating college... the college of insect extermination. They start up their own exterminating service and get a job clearing out a spooky empty mansion in the dead of night. The late owner was a magician.

It's the Bowery Boys led by Slip and Sach. There is plenty of their hijinks. The magician home is built for them. I always have good clean fun with these guys.