Monsters Crash the Pajama Party

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.

The movie's plot has been explained well in other entries here, so I'll just cut to background and some context here. This movie was made to be part of the old movie theatre spookshow circuit. Nothing more. At one point in the movie the gorilla and other monsters walk toward the screen and this would have cued actors in the theatre to come out dressed in similar costumes to terrorize the audience. The next scene shows the monsters bring a girl in to be operated on, by this time the actors would have retreated back behind the screen.

Yes, it's cheesy fun, it was meant to be.It would have been shown as a part of a full evening of horror movies, cartoons, "live" monsters and ghosts, maybe a magic show and more, with the theatre rigged to producee various special effects.

That this movie survives at all is a treat, but it does need to be seen with the understanding of it's time frame and how it would have been shown.

The costumes as bad, but they were made to approximate how the actors (usually locally hired teenagers) would have looked when they came out into the audience.

Recommended, if in a silly mood as part of a Halloween evening's show with a favorite horror movie. "Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark" would make an excellent double feature with this one! I'd also recommend as another suggestion "Zacherley's Horrible Horror" , a compilation of 2 hours of classic bad horror movies, hosted by Zacherley. Now, thats what I'd call Halloween!

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.

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.

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!