Monsters Crash the Pajama Party

Very odd and very short color film that tries as a horror comedy. There are no opening credits. The film opens with a man wearing a lab coat with "Mad Doctor" on his coat pocket. He talks to the audience for a while and then we get an announcer read to us who is in the movie, who made it, who edited it, etc while we see a man in a gorilla suit in different settings. Looks like an amateur film.

Plot concerns a group of sorority pledges who have to spend the night in a haunted house. The house has a mad doctor, a gorilla, a hunchback, an oriental woman, and a werewolf in the basement. Whole thing is done in fun with gorilla frequently holding up signs with one word phrases.

Let's put aside reviewing "Monsters Crash the Pajama Party". I love bad movies, and picked up the DVD for that, (and due to the seeming endless list of program content), but this DVD from "Something Weird" is meant to be digested as a whole offering. I was not aware of the history of the spook shows, having been a child in the 70's, after the fad had passed on, but this DVD is a lot of fun...it leaves you to root around several spooky menus, finding tidbits and exploring for more. And for some reason, the 45 minutes of "linking trailers" and promotional title cards that would have been shown ahead of the midnight shows back in the day was fascinating to me. It really paints a picture of a different time in our culture, when clean-cut teens could be grabbed by monster-suit wearing extras in the theater, without lawsuits following, and where watching "scary" movies was fun. Made me sad I missed it all.

So, yes, "Pajama Party" is bad, but it shouldn't be looked at like a regular movie, but drunk in as part of the whole "Spook show" tribute that this DVD is....lovingly compiled by someone who also wrote a very informative booklet in the DVD. I urge any fan of old-time horror, or the 50's and 60's in general, to pick this up. Really great fun.

by itself, it's dreadful.

Horrible short film about some idiots who decide to spend a night in a haunted house. Naturally there's a mad doctor in the basement doing some stupid experiments...or something.

Tacky sets, lousy acting, stupid script, dumb jokes...really a chore to sit through. Seeing this in a movie theatre as part of a spook show it probably worked. By itself it just looks pretty desperate. Still, I suppose we should be grateful that this even exists anymore. It IS an important piece of American cinema (so to speak). But I really can't give it more than a 2.

Monsters Crash the Pajama Party (1965)

1/2 (out of 4)

Long before audience members started acting out The Rocky Horror Picture Show, there were the famous "Spook Shows". With these events theaters would show some sort of low-budget horror movie and do a William Castle-like event of having monsters from the screen walking around in the theater scaring those watching the movie. This film has five sorority girls spending the night in a haunted house where an evil doctor and his gorilla assistant are doing nasty experiments. As far as the film goes it's incredibly poorly made, features horrid acting and the so called story is very weak but I guess the events in the movie would make for an interesting spook show. Since I only have the film itself to review then it's not really fair to guess what the spook show crowd would have done but even at thirty-minutes this particular show is hard to get through. I think what really hurts the film is how it starts. There aren't any opening credits and instead we just have a narrator telling us who directed, stars and wrote the film. Okay but we also have the gorilla acting out all the jobs, which is okay I guess but this sequence runs on and on to the point where it just gets boring. The only time I laughed during the film is one sequence where a werewolf jumps out to scare the girls but his pants fall down instead.

How ANYONE that has procured and sat through this film (I'm referring to the first reviewer, no offense) can not know the details of WHY this film is so short just amazes me! The entire lore and told & retold story of this film is half of it's entertainment! This film was two thirds (the beginning and end) on film and one third (the middle) a live spook show/stage show! The film pauses and all the monsters and whoever all jump out of the screen, terrorize the audience and do a little show, sit on peoples laps, cut heads off of audience members, etc, etc. Then they run back into the screen and the last third of the film plays...the end! The only film of it's kind! I wonder why...hmmmmm...hahahahaha. Now if only there was footage of the live part!!!