Monsters Crash the Pajama Party (Spook Show Spectacular)

Description

Grab the kids, lower the lights, and turn every night into Halloween with the Monsters Crash the Pajama Party Spook Show Spectacular! It's a Spookaroo Whoop-de-doo with this Terrorific 3-hour-plus Spooktacular containing everything you need for your very own Spook Party! First, join some terrified teens who spend a night in a haunted house and get spooked by a mad doctor and his ghoulish gang when the Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, a hilarious 1965 theatrical featurette complete with werewolf, gorilla in a fur coat, and goofy gimmick! Then, feel your eyes pop out of their sockets when you check into The Asylum of the Insane, a startling short subject with monsters in 3-D Spookarama (3-D glasses included)! But that's not all! This scary, screwy, chill-arious fright show includes bonus shorts, Spook Show previews, audio commentaries, How to Put on Your Own Spook Show, music by The Dead Elvi, and much more--plus the bonus feature-length chiller-diller Tormented!

Free 3-D glasses; 2 Audio Commentaries by ghostmasters Philip "Dr. Evil" Morris and Harry "Dr. Jekyl" Wise; Short subjects Don't Be Afraid, Spook House Ride, Drive-In Werewolf and Chased by Monsters; Horror Home Productions from the 1920s, '40s and '60s, including London After Midnight, The Mummy, Mr. Hyde and more, with musical accompaniment by the Chiller Theatre house band, The Dead Elvi; Spooky Musical Soundies; Spooks-a-Poppin' Trailer Show, containing over 45 minutes of rare Spook Show previews including The Great London Ghost Show, Dr. Evil and His Terrors of the Unknown, Dr. Jekyl and his 'Real Gone' Weird Show, and many more; Gallery of 300 Spook Show Stills and Exploitation Art; Radio-Spot Rarities; Illustrated essay How to Put on Your Own Spook Show; Secrets of the Spook Show booklet by ghostmaster Jim The Mad Doctor Ridenour; Bonus feature: Musician Richard Carlson is haunted by a ghostly girlfriend in director Bert I. Gordon's chiller-diller Tormented (1960, 72 min.); plus a special introduction in Hypnoscope will give you the courage to face the terror!

Customer Reviews:

Where the **** is the MENU?.......2007-08-25

Let me begin by ANSWERING where to find the menu:

This disc doesn't have one! HOWEVER if you look this title up on the Internet Movie DataBase, and go to the discussion board, a frustrated fan and viewer has posted a painstaking (and if you have tried to watch this DVD even once, you will understand how much trouble he went through), illustrated page-by-page guide to navigating the hidden menu items.

He posts a written description of each page, the icon and what it leads to and a puckish description of what the clip or feature is.

Now, as to the DVD itself, I would give this disc NO stars at all if I could simply because it has the ABSOLUTE WORST menu concept of all time: multiple, "Easter Egg" style pages with no words and no indication of where to find them until you -often accidentally- highlight or click them.

That said, I actually thoroughly enjoyed the content (once I could find it). The retro charm of the teasers and promos of the bygone 20-60's reveal something of the innocence of those times, as well as the less sophisticated promotional techniques.

I have to admit that the 3-D home movies were utterly lame and were probably included just because they were there and somebody said "Why not use the 3-D as a selling point?"

Not to be overlooked, however, is the old home movie footage from the late 20's-very early 30's of some teenagers doing their own version of London After Midnight. This was a pre-Dracula vampire movie -now lost- but the historic value of seeing this period spoof of it is considerable.

Dimestore Monsters Run Amok! BRILLIANT!!!.......2005-02-25

This DVD is a mishmash. A low-rent theatrical short here, a trip through a carnival haunted house there, some still shots of old spookshow posters in between. In fact, "Monsters Crash the Pajama Party" is nearly impossible to describe. It's not a feature film, though there is a feature ("Tormented") included somewhere on the disc. Nor is it primarily about the title segment, a short monster/comedy flick starring a bunch of college kids and a mad scientist. Instead, it's almost as if the entire DVD is made up of extras. But what a great collection of extras it is! For one low price, you get monsters, happenin' 60s co-eds, horrible narration, REALLY bad acting, a bit of 3-D, a guy in a bargain-basement gorilla outfit and a whole lot more! Watching this disc feels like channel surfing in a world in which the Cramps run all the TV stations. It's like watching snippets of movies made by people who...well...wish they could make better movies. The result? It's absolutely, over-the-top brilliant; a patchwork of lowbrow cinema that will leave you wondering, "Where the heck did this stuff ever play??"

My only complaint about this disc (and I'm docking it a whole star for this) is that it's REALLY hard to navigate! The viewer is pretty much left to just stumble onto various scenes by trial and error. It's an amazing collection of clips and snippets overall, but this thing should have come with a map.

Monsters Crash the Editing.......2004-12-05

This DVD is so hard to navigate, it's nearly unwatchable, and extremely frustrating. The viewer is promted through a series of arcade-type mazes and must click on pictures within each scene to view chapters. Chapters aren't named, so even getting to "Monsters Crash the PJ Party" feature is major undertaking. In two chapters, "Monsters Crash..." shows while an old radio show plays over the feature. In two others, the viewer is shown still clips of instructions that are meant to pull off a gag stunt on a city-wide basis - - "How to Bury Someone Alive," and something else. Neither stunt would fly in todays modern scene. Instructions could probably be found on the net in 2 minutes, while getting to them via the DVD would take more like 50 minutes.

I used to think Director Ed Wood's "Plan 9 Form Outer Space" was the worst movie ever made, but "Monsters Crash the Pajama Party" has given me pause for thought.

A lot of fun for virtually all-ages...........2004-06-25

...especially those who love horror films or Halloween. Sure the material is cheesy;it's supposed to be. This DVD is the most fun I've had where searching for contents is concerned as virtually all items are in the form of horror easter eggs. The only quibble I have is that some of the actual hidden easter eggs should have been unseen material, as opposed to quick clips of material already on the disc. The kind of DVD I would probably view and have fun with a few times a year. Worth it alone for all the classic horror artwork featured in most of the material...

"Take The Mad Doctor And His Talking Toilet Home!".......2004-05-25

I chose the title of the review based on one thing only: it was the most entertaining line from the entire DVD. I am a big Something Weird fan, and almost always love their work, but this time I have to make an exception. This DVD is really pretty boring, except for the drama of 'Tormented' and the lowbrow comedy of 'Monsters Crash The Pajama Party'. Since 'Monsters Crash The Pajama Party' was selected as the title for the DVD, let's begin there. The story is basically this: five sorority pledges stay in a haunted house and fall victim to the resident mad doctor (we know this because "Mad Doctor" is emblazoned on his lab coat.) There is much wackiness foisted on the audience over the next 30 minutes, including men in gorilla suits, women in chains, a werewolf in polka dotted boxer shorts, a laser cannon that seemingly has no point, and police detectives summoned to investigate it all because of a noise complaint. The film ends in absolute mid-action when a monkey bangs a gong, and it's suddenly over; no climax, no denouement, nothing. The best part of the film are some fairly entertaining credits done with guys in gorilla suits at the opening. It is campy fun that is timed just right at 30 minutes; any more would be pushing the limits. Besides 'Tormented' this is easily the best thing on the DVD.

Seemingly out of place to me on the disc is 'Tormented' a feature length psychological drama of love torn asunder in a lighthouse by Bert I. Gordon, who for once uses characters of normal size. 'Tormented' is well made and fairly creepy, and therefore not really in keeping with the rest of the DVD, which is thematically tied to spook shows of the 1920s to 1960s. I like 'Tormented,' and that (plus some funny camp value points from 'Monsters Crash The Pajama Party') is what brought this DVD up to three stars for me.

Now that I have discussed the good, let's turn to the bad. In any discussion of the bad features of this DVD, the logical place to start is the index. This DVD has the worst designed, most irritating and utterly pointless index system I have ever seen. Some people seem to like the 'hidden Easter egg' charm of this index, but most people will hate it. Let me explain. The index has no words, merely symbols like a bat or a headstone to select the features. This means that there is absolutely no way to find what you are looking for other than by random chance. To further aggravate the viewer, there are multiple sub-menus of index functions, meaning that the search is even more aggravating than it even sounds. I will never watch this DVD again for that reason alone.

There is a short feature, wholly inappropriately titled 'The Asylum of the Insane'. It is in 3-D, and (very cheap) glasses are provided, but it doesn't really matter, as the 3-D does not work on a television, but gave me a big time headache (or perhaps it's the content that did it...) This movie is not terribly horrifying inasmuch as it consists of ten minutes of some kids throwing a football around, an old guy doing yo-yo tricks, and a some teenagers in Halloween masks poking baseball bats and hatchets at the camera. To exacerbate the 'horror', there is the bonus of no sound, so it's really a silent movie of a Saturday afternoon with some adolescent boys. It is the most utterly pointless piece of celluloid ever exposed to the light of day.

There are scads of other, unrelated things, like some bad horror shorts from the 1920s to 1960s set to the tune of "Little Jack-o-lantern" sung by 'The Dead Elvi'. There are some amazingly boring audio tracks superimposed over random other things like stills and spook show art (this gets tedious...there are 300 stills in this section), there is a ride through a fun house, something called 'Chased By Monsters', that I never grasped it's reason for existing, and it's all introduced by the amazing 'Hypnoscope,' an effect used much more effectively by Ray Dennis Steckler in 'The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies.' There is also a documentary named 'Don't Be Afraid', about fearing darkness, but honestly after looking over and over through that stupid menu, I could never find it, so I really can't tell you anything about it.

This DVD was supposed to be fun. Instead, all I felt was 'Tormented'.

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