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.

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.

A rather short film, but actually this works well as the script and material probably couldn't have filled up much more time anyway. A mix between horror and farce, this is one of those films that is so bad it's good, and the whole cast and crew do seem to be enjoying themselves even with the low production values. Monsters Crash the Pajama Party is a strange little movie, but once you begin to watch it you realize it's a film that doesn't take itself too seriously and you'll want to stay with it until the end. An interesting movie to watch!

In order to get even close to the full effect, you must get the Something Weird DVD version and imagine yourself to be a teenager in the 50's or 60's. Spook shows were evening-long events, not just a movie, and the atmosphere was giddy and creepy at the same time. I personally just missed being old enough to experience it first-hand, but have talked to many people who did go to them.

Some were awful and amateurish and some did a good job. But they were never meant to be anything more than a good time to have with your date or friends. And this movie probably typifies the experience more than any other--a little self-indulgent, a little off-kilter, and good, cheesy fun.

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.