Monsters Crash the Pajama Party

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.

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.

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.

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.