Phil Rosen

The East Side Kids, a gang of streetwise New York teenagers, are shipped off to a summer camp in the country and end up stranded in a town where a "monster killer" is said to be on the loose. After one of them is wounded, they take shelter at a hilltop mansion owned by a mysterious caped figure named Nardo, played by Bela Lugosi, and his dwarf assistant. The boys decide Nardo is a zombie master and tie him up. The film was made to pair Monogram's two biggest draws, Lugosi and the East Side Kids, and it leans into the comedy as much as the scares. Leo Gorcey's malapropism-heavy banter with Huntz Hall is the engine of the picture. The film entered the public domain because its copyright was not renewed.

Comedy · Horror

A radio-era whodunit from Monogram. Crooner Norman Wilder (Ralph Forbes) is the most popular voice on the air — but the voice isn't his: he has been secretly lip-syncing to a blacklisted singer, the "phantom" of the broadcast. When Wilder is shot dead mid-performance, detectives and rival singers pile into a case where everyone in the station had a motive and nobody is who they claim to be. Phil Rosen, one of Poverty Row's most prolific directors, keeps the mystery brisk. Its copyright was never renewed; it is in the public domain in the United States.

Mystery · Crime · Music

One of the six Charlie Chan pictures Sidney Toler made for Monogram after the series left Fox. When murders pile up around a radio station that is secretly tied to a wartime espionage ring, Chan works the case while his son Tommy and chauffeur Birmingham Brown stumble through the clues beside him. The film is best remembered for the extended comedy routine between Mantan Moreland and Ben Carter, whose rhyming, never-finished conversations became a signature of the Monogram Chans. Directed by series veteran Phil Rosen, it is a brisk poverty-row mystery that keeps the plot moving and the banter constant. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller

A string of murders has witnesses giving identical descriptions of a man seen leaving each scene — Jerome Breen, a wealthy philanthropist who has been deaf and mute since birth and could not possibly have been overheard. Lionel Atwill plays Breen in a Monogram old-dark-house mystery directed by Phil Rosen, with Sheila Terry as the reporter convinced there is more to the suspect than his affliction suggests, and Paul Hurst as the detective working the case. The solution, when it comes, is a genuinely nasty piece of pre-Code plotting. Made the same year Atwill headlined Mystery of the Wax Museum, it shows why he was the era's go-to man for quiet menace. The film is in the public domain.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller