The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1954)

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'.

***SPOILERS*** The "Bowery Boys" headed by Slip & Sach go out of their way to get the local kids a place to play stick-ball where they can't cause any damage to the community. In the breaking windows of local store owner especially those of Louie Dumbrowsky's Sweet Shop on the Bowery.Finding a sandlot that belongs to the Gravesend Family Slip & Sach, after making an appointment, drives out to the Gravesend Mansion in far off Long Island to get the families approval in letting the kids play in their lot. What the boys find instead is a bunch of mixed nuts who become obsessed in using them for their crazed brain transplant experiments as well as being used as food for their pet a man eating Venus Fly-trap plant. There's also the lovely Francine Gravesend an honest to goodness vampire who hasn't had a good meal or bite in years and finds both Slip & Sach's blood supply just what she needs to keep her from drying out.Better then you would expect "Bowery Boys" flick with the boys being targeted from a number of crazed medical experiments by the both man of the house Dr.Derek Gravesend and his crazy brother Anton for their own separat and insane operations. Sach to have his peanut brain transplanted into Derek's pride and joy Cosmo a 400 pound lowland gorilla who had recently appeared in a movie with Bela Lugoi and a pair of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis wannabes. As for slip his brain is to be used by Anton as the thinking machine for his robot Gorog who by walking into things keeps losing his head in the movie. It's Aunte Ameila Gravesend who got even better and more useful plans fro the boys in having them fed to her flesh eating plant since she's run out of stray cats and dogs in the neighborhood that she keeps it alive with! And last but not least there's the Gravesend family butler Grissom, or as the boys pronounced it "Gruesome", who himself ends up as one of the Gravesend bothers experiments that went wrong. That happens when Grissom or Gruesome mistakingly gulps down what looked like a harmless glass of coke and turned into a modern version of the Neanderthal Man.The usual slap sticks with Slip & Sach that keep the laughs flowing in the movie but by then you can see the "Bowery Boys", after 34 films, were starting to run out of ideas and that their antics on screen were starting to get a bit stale. It was in fact Cosmo the gorilla and Gorog the tin man as well as Amelia's cute and lovable flesh eating plant together with the Gravesend, for-runners of the Adams, Family who really made the movie "The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters" well worth watching.

I think what distinguishes this BB film from the 3 others I've come across is that the setting is more interesting, the support cast has better characters to play, and for some reason Huntz Hall's usual manic mugging and mannerisms seem more appropriate to the setting. I suppose that's because this is very similar in tone and structure to some of the Abbott and Costello films, and Hall's over-the-top double takes and freak outs work the same way that Costello's would in similar situations. I have to say that it was very clever of the producers to make this "Bowery Boys Meet THE Monsters", instead of "...SOME Monsters", because the title makes you think you will see Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein's monster, etc...instead, we get some generic substitutes. But I wasn't really disappointed...rather than have the classic Hammer archetypes be cheapened by yet another comedy ripoff, the screenplay just has fun with the idea - for instance, one is "a" vampire, and makes no attempt to pretend that this is the "Prince Of Darkness", so it doesn't hurt to see the idea played for cheesecake value. So it is with the mad scientists, the robot, the man eating plant, the Jekyll/Hyde formula, etc. The "monsters" are different enough from the usual run to add an element of freshness to the film. Also, the timing seems a little tighter and the director keeps things moving along. The "house full of monsters" set up allows for a nice rapid fire series of sight gags and word play and slapstick, and (as I said), the supporting cast get to be funny and interesting in their interaction with each other, as opposed to just being the straight men for the Boys.There's actually a bit of an Addams family dynamic that makes things go better than if the monsters just lunged out of the closet at our Boys. This was my fourth Bowery Boys film (how I came to see four of them is a long story), and I can't say I'll be unhappy if I never see another one. But it was the most enjoyable of the four, and it raised my opinion of their abilities and their film career.

This movie is a riot. I think that Sach is a very funny man, and that Leo Gorcey/Huntz Hall were as funny a team as any of them. Personally, I think the Bowery Boys are funnier than The Three Stooges, Though I enjoy them to. in this movie, there is a commotion in almost every scene. and I think that the Bowery Boys add their own flavor to things. Actually, I favor the Bowery Boys over Abbott and Costello as well. My two favorite teams are the Bowery Boys and Martin and Lewis. Too bad they never made a movie together. That would have been fun. Aside from this movie, I also loved the 'Navy' movie the Bowery Boys made. Just hilarious. A commotion in every scene. My kind of movie.