I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Any film that has a conversation about how to make prettier pickles is classic in my book, and this ends up being probably the best of the Bowery Boys films,an Abbott and Costello style horror film. There's a Lurch like Butler (Grisom, whom they keep referring to as Gruesome) who gets the predictable reaction when he orders Sach and Slip to "walk this way", a series of wacky relatives and an exotic Theda Bara like vamp, all gathered together in a spooky mansion where it's best to expect the unexpected. Some great character comics (among them Ellen Corby and Lloyd Corrigan) have a ball emoting dramatically for laughs. Corby has a tree monster who happens to like cats (as a snack, I'm sure), and Gruesome, err Grisom, takes a potion that makes him Mr. Hyde's long lost twin. A funny looking robot and a gorilla round out the ensemble of wacky creations/creatures.There's more laughs in this single entry than all of the series up to that time. The script is filled with funny gags and dialog ("The living of today are the skeletons of tomorrow"), and it's an interesting set design as well. Corby, looking like granny without the Tweety Bird, will delight her fans from "The Waltons", looking the same but no match for her no- nonsense matriarch as she regrets the lack of living flesh for her funny looking tree. Minimal screen time of the gang for all but Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall doesn't matter, as the wacky characters of this madhouse are entertainment enough.

This is the first Bowery Boys movie I've ever watched, and judging by what I've seen, I won't be in a hurry to check out their other movies, the 'boys' particular brand of slapstick and buffoonery leaving me straight-faced throughout.Clearly modelled after Abbot and Costello's 'Meet' series of films (which I also find not very funny), '..Meet The Monsters' sees Bowery boys Slip and Sach (Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall) paying a visit to a creepy mansion inhabited by a family of kooks and oddballs, each of whom want the unwary guests for their own nefarious reasons.With Hall's painfully unfunny dumb routine and Gorcey's excessive use of maladroits (that's fancy speak for using the wrong word), this film is already on shaky ground, but chuck in a moth eaten killer gorilla, a crap robot, and a rubber man eating tree, and what you have is a film that gives new meaning to the term 'lowbrow'.

Slip and Sach become mixed up with a family of weirdos in an old dark house in this thirty-fourth entry in the series. The family is the highlight of this one, with John Dehner, Ellen Corby, Laura Mason, Paul Wexler, and Lloyd Corrigan all turning in enjoyable performances. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall are fine as usual. Leo has some especially funny malapropisms in this one. David Gorcey and Bennie Bartlett get little to do. Bernard Gorcey is fun as Louie. It's a good B comedy with a lot of things for old horror and sci-fi fans, like a robot, a gorilla, a vampire, a man-eating plant, and a formula that turns a guy into a Mr. Hyde-type monster. Definitely one of the better later Bowery Boys films.

Neighborhood kids playing baseball in the street in front of Louie's sweetshop keep hitting baseballs through his storefront window. Sach suggests they get permission for the kids to use a big, vacant lot nearby. Slip telephones the lot owners, the Gravesend family-- Slip wants permission to use the lot because he is a "bene-fracturer" of humanity. They are invited to drive over, since mad scientists Dr. Derek Gravesend and Anton Gravesend want brains-- to put into their gorilla and robot! Derek needs a tiny brain; Anton notes: "A creature with a brain that small wouldn't have sense enough to come in out of the rain." Quick cut to Sach, standing in the rain. At the spooky house, Slip and Sach meet Grissom, the butler, whom they call "Gruesome" (kind of a prototype Lurch, 10 years before "The Addams Family"). The Boys also meet a sexy female vampire Francine Gravesend (a prototype Morticia); she wants them for their blood. Amelia Gravesend wants to feed the Boys to her Agopanthus Carnivorous, her man-eating tree (sort of like in "The Wizard of Oz"). There are old jokes, such as the butler saying: "Walk this way" (this joke would be 20 years older in "Young Frankenstein"). Some jokes are pure Bowery Boys-- the butler says, "This old manor house goes back to colonial times; take this chair for instance: 1775." To which Slip retorts, "17.75? Anybody that paid over 3 bucks for it got rooked!" Some skits are recycled: Slip and Sach are locked in a closet; they use a saw to cut a hole in the far wall, and crawl through-- it leads to a cage with a gorilla in it. If this scene looks familiar, it's because it had been used before with the Three Stooges short "Dizzy Detectives" (1943). There's lots more fun and scary thrills. Just watch this movie and enjoy!Paul Wexler would appear in other horror movies, like "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake." Laura Mason would appear in other films, as a Harem Girl, and then a Venus Girl in "Queen of Outer Space." Lloyd Corrigan had been in a previous Bowery Boys movie "Ghost Chasers" (1951). John Dehner would play occult characters in "The Twilight Zone" in the episodes: "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" & "The Jungle." Steve Calvert (Cosmos the gorilla) had played an ape in "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla"; his last movie was playing a gorilla in the Ed Wood 'classic': "The Bride and the Beast." Trivia: this is the only Bowery Boys movie with "Bowery Boys" in the title.