the audience applauded

Perfectly adorable

Better Late Then Never

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Determined to keep the East Side Kids out of trouble and ultimately out of juvenile hall (which to be honest, they'd still be too old for at this early point in her career...), an understanding judge sends them to his country home in the mountains. They end up in the spooky mansion of a judge who is an important witness in a criminal case and deal with the possible presence of ghosts, as well as a spooky housekeeper, various secret passageways, and most frighteningly, murder! The result is one of the best of the early East Side Kids films after their Warner Brothers years that is entertaining from start to finish.While this entry in the series is missing Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan and Leo Gorcey are still around as the leaders of the gang, leading in both dialog and action, with only a few comic bits given to the black Sammy Morrison. Of course, some of those bits are extremely racist, especially when sinister looking housekeeper Minerva Urecal serves the boys small fruit cups and gives Morrison a huge piece of watermelon. Urecal has one of the best roles of her career, spoofing every sinister housekeeper or strange relative, most obviously Eva Moore in "The Old Dark House" (spooking heroine Inna Gest with comments on her "pale, white flesh") and Judith Anderson in "Rebecca".While the plot is predictable, the screenplay is loaded with some of the funniest malapropisms of the kid's extremely lengthy career and there is definitely a macabre element to the spooky atmosphere, from the antique graveyard in Judge Forrest Taylor's back yard to the "Cat and the Canary" like candle-lit hallways. It ranks high above many of the similar films being done at the low-grade Monogram and PRC (and even the slightly more expensive Universal) and the results make this a film you might want to re-visit, even if you'll steer clear of this delightfully haunted mansion.

The East Side boys like Mugs Malone played by Leo Gorcey and Bobby Jordan and his pals get to leave the city for a time in the country. They end up at a Gothic, haunted mansion where the housekeeper is my favorite character. She blames somebody for the death of her beloved mistress well the former lady of the house. I love the comment she makes about the cook which is "I liked the cook." The gang try to help a pretty damsel in distress who is caught up with some shady characters including a judge and others. It's the East Side Boys to her rescue and the house in Westchester's Briarcliff Manor. The pretty young lady is an heiress. Anyway, the East Side Boys was to escape during the 1940s time period when the country was coming off of the Great Depression and going into World War II. This film isn't great but it's entertaining even now.

The East Side Kids had a couple of films going by "Spooks Run Wild" and "Ghosts on the Loose", but this one seems even better suited to a ghost story than the other two. It's got some atmospheric creepy sets, a long dungeon like room, and someone even dons the white sheets unlike the aforementioned films. What hampers the story though is some really shoddy writing and a make it up as you go sensibility that just about kills any interest in the story once it's under way. For me, this was not one of the better East Side Kids efforts.It starts out with a familiar premise; get the boys out of the city to keep them out of trouble, under the watchful eye of Danny's (Bobby Jordan) big brother Knuckles (Dave O'Brien). The core group this time out includes Muggs (Leo Gorcey) and Scruno (Sunshine Sammy Morrison), with a little help from Peewee (Donald Haines) and Skinny (Frankie Burke). Burke looks every bit the young Jimmy Cagney here, maybe even more so than he did as the young Rocky Sullivan in "Angels With Dirty Faces".If you're not used to it, the racial connotations to Scruno's character get a workout in the film to the point of embarrassment. In the bouncy car ride to the country, he complains of getting bruised 'black and blue'; at Briarcliff Manor, he's the only one served a huge slice of watermelon and he fairly dives right into it. Scruno takes it all in stride as in all of his appearances, also making the most of the bug eyed stereotype whenever something remotely scary might happen.The surprise of the film for me was Minerva Urecal, she's really got the sinister housekeeper act nailed in this outing. The next time you see Cloris Leachman in "Young Frankenstein", she's doing Minerva's Agatha character from this film, I would bet on it.Once things get going, the film gets some mileage out of the old sliding bookcase trick and the occasional sound of sinister organ music. The murder mystery itself is handled a bit sloppy, especially when the unknown character under the Manor turns out to be from the District Attorney's office. The revelation that Judge Parker's bodyguard was a member of the Maury Gang who wanted him rubbed out seemed a bit curious after the fact. Didn't anyone have an idea what Maury's guys might have looked like? Best line of the film this time around goes to Leo Gorcey - "Say, what's the Thin Man got that I ain't got?"

Cheap sets. B-list performers and some typical-for-the-era (but nonetheless annoying) racial stereotypes fail to distinguish this tale of embezzlement and murder set at a creepy country mansion. Leo Gorcey and the gang provide the comic relief, which -- except for the cigar scene -- is not particularly funny. Unless, that is, you get a kick out of things like watching Ernest "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison get pop-eyed over graveyards and spooks, or listening to him extol the virtues of a big slice of watermelon.Though Minerva Urecal did a fairly good job as a sort of cut-rate Mrs. Danvers, I'd only recommend this one to rabid Gorcey fans and B-movie antiquarians.