A group of teenage girls are spending the night in a haunted house as part of a sorority initiation. The girls are dropped off by their boyfriends. The guys decide to go back to town and buy some Halloween masks so they can come back and scare the girls. The girls of course expect this.
What the girls don’t know is that there is a basement laboratory occupied by a Mad Doctor (Vic McGee). You know he is a mad doctor because it says so on his lab coat. The mad doctor has a pet gorilla, a werewolf, a green skinned monster thing and a vampire creature called Draculina (Pauline Hillcurt).
The Mad Doctor sends his gorilla to capture one of the girls so he can experiment on her. He turns her into a human gorilla. Apparently, the experiment doesn’t last long, and she returns to normal and escapes from the laboratory. The Mad Doctor then sends out his clan of creatures to capture all the girls and chain them up in the dungeon. Just then the guys return with their store-bought masks to rescue the girls. The Mad Doctor then sends his minions out into the theater audience to capture another girl.
“Monsters Crash the Pajama Party” was released in 1965 and was directed by David L. Hewitt. It is an American horror comedy short and only about thirty-one minutes long, including the six minutes of beginning credits. The beginning credits are spoken and not written.
The film was part of a movie theater spook show. Nowadays there are “Haunted House” exhibits that people wander through on Halloween to get spooked out. Back in the day the kids would go to the local movie theater and watch midnight madness shows, which were a bunch of spooky movies. Before the main attraction there would be a short film like this one to warm things up. At some point during the short, people in costume would appear to come out of the screen and into the audience. The intent was just to get into the spirit of the event and have some laughs and a couple not quite scary moments.
This type of entertainment was popular mostly in the fifties and early sixties. In the film “The Blob” 1958, when the blob infests the local movie house the theater was having a midnight spook show at the time. These spook-fest shorts were monster themed with bad actors, bad scripts, lame costumes and even lamer jokes. All of which are here aplenty, however, the fact that this one survived is itself a surprise and something worth saving.
Director Hewitt’s wife is the woman wearing the red baby-doll pajamas.