Although the name of the film might give you the idea that it was the ancestor of the immensely successful Ghostbuster films of the Eighties, Spook Busters has the Bowery Boys get into the ghost business quite by accident.
Not that there are any real ghosts in Spook Busters, but the people where newly graduated exterminator Leo Gorcey has been hired to rid the place of six legged pests by the rental agent are keeping up the rumors it's a haunted house because of the experiments they're conducting. But when chief scientist Douglass Dumbrille takes one look at Huntz Hall, he decides Hall would be a grand subject for his latest experiment. What is that you say, why merely to exchange Hall's brain for that of a gorilla's and vice versa. Just the sort of stuff that movie mad scientists go around doing, though one does have to ask why.
Douglass Dumbrille who was one of film's best villains at both a serious and a comic one. He's best known for being the shyster lawyer Mr. Cedar in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. But in a comic vein we've seen him roll down a department store floor after The Marx Brothers in The Big Store and in an Indian suit after Lou Costello in Ride 'Em Cowboy. Dumbrille really enjoyed the comic villain roles and he looks like he's having an equally good time with the Bowery Boys as a mad scientist.
You can't expect too much from Monogram Pictures, but Spook Busters is a good example of the Bowery Boys and their shtick.
Not that there are any real ghosts in Spook Busters, but the people where newly graduated exterminator Leo Gorcey has been hired to rid the place of six legged pests by the rental agent are keeping up the rumors it's a haunted house because of the experiments they're conducting. But when chief scientist Douglass Dumbrille takes one look at Huntz Hall, he decides Hall would be a grand subject for his latest experiment. What is that you say, why merely to exchange Hall's brain for that of a gorilla's and vice versa. Just the sort of stuff that movie mad scientists go around doing, though one does have to ask why.
Douglass Dumbrille who was one of film's best villains at both a serious and a comic one. He's best known for being the shyster lawyer Mr. Cedar in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. But in a comic vein we've seen him roll down a department store floor after The Marx Brothers in The Big Store and in an Indian suit after Lou Costello in Ride 'Em Cowboy. Dumbrille really enjoyed the comic villain roles and he looks like he's having an equally good time with the Bowery Boys as a mad scientist.
You can't expect too much from Monogram Pictures, but Spook Busters is a good example of the Bowery Boys and their shtick.