A cute film where Bela Lugosi meets The East Side Kids(Bowery Boys). The movie is fun to watch if you like the older comedy-horror films. I did not bust-a-gut laughing but I did find the film enjoyable - refreshing.The Boys end up in a boys camp, peewee is shot, there is a murderer on the loose, a strange creepy old house, some humor and, of course, Bela Lugosi. This really is a good family style horror film - good to watch with the kids.Lugosi has much better films than this one but the movie is a must for Lugosi fans - it's a simple, lighthearted comedy-horror film.Make it a double feature with Ghosts on the Loose (1943)! 6.5/10

1. When Bela Lugosi's character (Nardo) and his sidekick drive up to the filling station, and later, when the Professor Von Grosch drives up, the attendants is already reading a book about the Monster Killer (supposedly Lugosi) and the Professor who "has come to save us."2. When the Boy are whisked off the street to camp, none gets to even see his parents.3. Nardo's and Luigi's vanishing act at the cemetery is never explained. Was the cemetery caretaker tricked by illusion?4. Lugosi, when he arrives at the Billings Estate, had asked for directions there so it is assumed he had not been in the mansion before. Yet, he seems to know all the nooks and crannies of the house when Muggs and the kids arrive. Nardo was driving only a truck with caskets in them. Suddenly he is settled in. When Nardo and Luigi were in the cemetery, they saw Diana Billings headstone. "Diana Billings. Winter came after 18 "schort" summers," Nardo says. "She was beautiful." It is not explained if he knew Diana or how he came to occupy her former home. 5. When the kids disappear from camp and Jeff and Linda's cannot locate them, Jeff rushes into the camp office. One is sitting around and the other is at his desk reading a paper. Jeff announces there is no sign of the boys and he's going to town "and we'll probably need a search party," he says in an urgent way. The camp official just keeps on looking at the paper without flinching. "OK," he says and keeps on reading. Look, camp counselor, 6 of your kids are missing. What is so interesting in what you are reading?6. And after all the loose ends are tight up at the haunted Mansion and the search party and the kids and Lugosi are all sitting in the living room for an inpromptu magic act by Nardo, why is Margie the soda fountain girl there? What made her journey to that place of mayhem in the middle of the night?Wonderful movie. Twists and turns and soooo nonsensical. I love it!

Would anyone have believed that an Academy Award would be in the future for one of the participants in Spooks Run Wild back in 1941? I think one would have been told to get a cranial examination. Yet Carl Foreman who wrote the screenplay would be getting one eleven years later for High Noon. Unfortunately blacklist was also in his future.Academy Award winners didn't usually work at Monogram Pictures, but one starts to learn the trade somewhere in the film business. In this case it's with The Bowery Boys. They've been sent in the charge of Dave O'Brien and Dorothy Short to a summer camp. The boys go wandering off and come upon a haunted house occupied by Bela Lugosi.The usual Bowery Boy monkeyshines are present throughout. When the boys go wandering off however, we're informed that a serial killer is also loose in the area. It's from Monogram so don't expect all that much. Still it's interesting to see the genesis of High Noon?

The boys are rounded up and sent to summer camp in the Catskill mountains in "Spooks Run Wild". However, there is a pretty waitress in the town's diner that they would like to have a date with, so they sneak away from the camp at night-time and one of them is shot by the caretaker of the local cemetery which forces the boys to take refuge in Lugosi's creepy hillside manor. There has been a killer on the loose and the boys naturally think that Lugosi is the killer and spend a nervous night meandering through his mansion trying to find their entranced friend who had been given a mild sedative. Nice film and the first of the East Side Kids film to feature Huntz Hall. The films studio, Monogram, reunited Lugosi and the East Side Kids two years later in the less entertaining "Ghosts on the Loose". Hall's line in "Spooks Run Wild" pertaining to his wearing a suit of armor: "My tailor told me it would wear like iron" is absolutely hilarious!