And, to be honest, this review isn't going to be about a Bowery Boys movie, at least not technically. TCM has on multiple occasions run through the entire set of four dozen or so movies that the Bowery Boys made after World War II. The Bowery Boys were what eventually came out of a group of players from the movie Dead End (which I did a post on ages ago). At some point along the way, first Universal and then Monogram wound up with those "Dead End Kids" under contract, and called them the "East Side Kids". And it's one of those movies that I have on my DVR and recently watched: Ghosts on the Loose.
The movie starts with the Kids rehearsing musical numbers, led by the "conductor" Mugs (Leo Gorcey), who seems to know the technical aspects of music about as well as the rest of the kids do. Another of the kids, Glimpy (Huntz Hall), has a sister Betty (Ava Gardner in a very early role, and yes, the idea of Ava Gardner and Huntz Hall being siblings is ridiculous), and she's about to get married to a guy named Jack (Rick Vallin). Betty and Jack are going to be moving to the edge of town because that's where they were able to get a really good deal on a house.
We then learn that there's a reason for the good deal, which is that the previous owners of the house are convinced that the neighboring house is haunted. There are mysterious goings-on, but of course no actual ghosts; think the Scooby-Doo cartoons with the bad guys thinking they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids. The kids are about to meddle, albeit not intentionally.
Betty and Jack go off on their honeymoon, and Glimpy and his friends decide they're going to do a favor for the new couple by helping to decorate the new house for when the new couple gets home. The only thing is, they get the address wrong, and go to the house that's allegedly haunted. In fact, it's not haunted, although it has a lot of the tropes of haunted-house films like secret passages and paintings with the eyes cut out so that people can look into another room without getting caught.
The master, if you will, of the allegedly haunted house is Emil (Bela Lugosi), and he's really the leader of a ring of fifth columnists who have been printing Nazi propaganda out of this house which Mugs and Glimpy figure out when they find a printing press in one of the basement rooms along with a bunch of said propaganda that's been left there with the baddies not expecting anybody to trespass. (Ghosts on the Loose was released in 1943; right in the middle of US involvement in World War II.) The Kids go to inform the authorities, but thanks to those secret passages it takes a while for everything to work out right in the end. Not too long however, as this is only a B movie with a running time of about 66 minutes.
After leaving the big studios -- Dead End was a Goldwyn film IIRC and the Dead End Kids made multiple films at Warner Bros. -- the East Side Kids and then Bowery Boys films became low-budget affairs with formulaic plots. Ghosts on the Loose is definitely that way, although I think it's ultimately watchable for the ridiculousness of the Bela Lugosi half of the movie. It's also not a bad way to introduce people to what Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and company were all about.
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