The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1954)

Wonderful character development!

Just perfect...

I wanted to but couldn't!

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The Bowery Boys films simply went on way, way too long. After all, they made 48...not counting the ones made before this by many members of the group in such incarnations as the East Side Kids, the Dead End Kids and the Little Tough Guys! Talk about over-saturation!! And, to make it worse, after Bernard Gorcey died, his son, Leo, quit the series...and yet they still made more films!!! To make things worse, they often tended to reuse plot ideas--and the Boys ended up battling baddies in haunted houses many, many times...too many! This is why I really was not impressed with "The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters".So despite all this, is this later Bowery Boys film worth your time? Well, for some (those who hate the films), no...and for devoted fans, yes. But for the average person...it's probably NOT a good place to start. Instead, find one of their earlier films--the ones they made just after WWII.This film finds the gang going to Gravesend Manor--where the weirdos living there are anxiously awaiting the visit. At first, they are excited by how stupid Slip sounds when he phones them but upon meeting Sach they realize he's perfect for a brain transfer to a gorilla...something they actually did in several other previous films!! The lack of originality make this hard to distinguish! It's all essentially a retread...and the earlier haunted house/brain transfer with ape films were better. The only major difference? They've also got a giant silly robot in this one...ugh!

***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'm one of the few people around who can still recall seeing first release Bowery Boy movies. I was eleven years old when this one hit the silver screen. I can recall laughing until I cried when the monsters began appearing. Any hard core Bowery boy enthusiast recalls the wonderful job done by Leo Gorcy, who played "Slip" Mahoney and Huntz Hall who played "Satch". They played off each other perfectly and their on screen characterization of a pair of gang members from the mid century Bowery made the comedy that much sweeter. I can't recall seeing a Bowery Boys movie that I didn't like. Some were better than others, but my buddies and I would have walked to the next town to see any of their movies. Oddly enough, Leo Gorcy died quite young without much money. He passed away in 1969 at about 52 years of age. Huntz Hall on the other hand lived to be about 80 years old and passed away in 1999. He apparently was quite well off, having owned a 10% interest in the Bowery Boys and having made some very profitable oil and gas investments. I owe a lot of happy hours to these two fine actors from the early years of movie comedy.

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.