Ghosts on the Loose

Ghosts on the Loose (1943)

You'll yell with glee when these happy-go-lucky hooligans invade the shivery domain of the Man of a Thousand Horrors! It's Chill-arious!

The East Side Kids try to fix up a house for newlyweds, but find the place next door "haunted" by mysterious men.

Date of release
1943-07-30
TMDB
4.2 / 10 (36)
Runtime
1h 7m
Genres
Comedy, Mystery, Horror
Director
William Beaudine
Collection
East Side Kids Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

Ghosts on the Loose is a 1943 American comedy horror film and the fourteenth film in the East Side Kids series, directed by William Beaudine. The picture co-stars horror film icon Bela Lugosi as well as Ava Gardner in one of her earliest roles.

Production

The film was originally called Ghosts in the Night, which had also been the working title for Spooks Run Wild, the first time Lugosi worked with the East Side Kids. The film was a "special" from Monogram. They borrowed Ava Gardner from MGM (then best known as having been married to Mickey Rooney) to play the female lead.

Filming began February 8, 1943. Exactly ten days earlier, producer Jack Dietz was sentenced to seven months in jail for tax evasion. The title was changed to Ghosts on the Loose in April 1943.

Later on in the film, when The East Side Kids, Rick Vallin, and Ava Gardner are waiting for the cops, Muggs says, "They should be here any minute". Glimpy responds by saying, "Who?", to which Muggs says, "Oh, he's on first". This is an obvious reference to the old vaudeville routine "Who's on First?", which had been done on stage by numerous comedians over the years but had been made famous during this period by Abbott and Costello.

Muggs makes reference to "The Katzman Mob," a jokey hat-tip to producer Sam Katzman.

Set in the United States home front during World War II, Muggs accuses Scruno of having hallucinations due to drinking too much coffee. Glimpy eagerly asks "Where did you get it?" due to the rationing of coffee from 1942 onwards.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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