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.
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Wow, this dvd is so good and so full of information that i bought a second copy to have as a back-up, i love it that much!Big thank you to all the people who took the hours and hours to put all this good stuff together on one dvd!Keep trying to find other dvds that are similar to this one and i can't find anything.Since i was born too late to go to any of the spook shows i really loved seeing and hearing all the advertisements and the homemade movies from i'm guessing the 40's were awesome!I tell ya, i could not love this dvd more, i even enjoyed the dvd navigation, well the first few times i did, then i found someone named kriegerg69 on IMDB who made a chapter list which i totally appreciate, thank him not me for the following list and thanks again to the makers of this awesome, unique dvd!!! :)Title 1 Monsters Crash The Pajama Party (7 chapters)
Title 2 Monsters Do Have Their Place
Title 3 Spook Show Trailers (12 chapters)
Title 4 Spooky Musical Soundies
Chapter 1 Skeleton Dance
Chapter 2 The Boogey Woogieman
Chapter 3 Dem Dry Bones
Chapter 4 Haunted House
Title 5 Horror Home Movies
Chapter 1 London After Midnight
Chapter 2 The Mummy
Chapter 3 Mr. Hyde
Chapter 4 1960's Halloween
Title 6 Don't Be Afraid
Title 7 Horror House Ride
Title 8 Drive In Werewolf (excerpt from "Dracula, The Dirty Old Man")
Title 9 Cursed By Monsters
Title 10 Asylum of the Insane (in 3D)
Title 11 Menu Menacing Ape
Title 12 Menu Skull
Title 13 Menu Skull & Booga Booga
Title 14 Hypnoscope Introduction
Title 15 Menu Transition
Title 16 Menu Transition
Title 17 Menu Transition
Title 18 Menu Transition
Title 19 Menu Transition
Title 20 Menu Transition
Title 21 Menu Transition
Title 22 Menu Transition
Title 23 Easter Egg
Title 24 Easter Egg
Title 25 Easter Egg
Title 26 Easter Egg
Title 27 Menu Dead End
Title 28 Menu Dead End
Title 29 Menu Dead End
Title 30 Menu Dead End
Title 31 Menu Dead End
Title 32 Menu Dead End
Title 33 TORMENTED (feature film 11 chapters)
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That's what I hear from people who realize I purchased this DVD...but man, I'm glad I did! It's a treasure hunt through a haunted house that you experience by clicking your remote control. There are tons of Easter eggs here with theatrical featurettes and promos a-plenty! Of course, the 30+ minute farce MONSTERS CRASH THE PAJAMA PARTY is so bad, it makes Ed Wood look like Spielberg. This is a loving "retro-mentary" on the old spook shows that movie houses used to present live onstage with a horror feature; magic shows, monsters, ghosts in the audience and scads of ghoulish fun all meant for the kids! There's no friggin' way any theater these days would have the guts to do this stuff without worrying about getting reprimanded by some activist group. And the early 60's feature TORMENTED is great schlock horror! Total enjoyment for everyone and such a wonderful, forgotten part of cinema history that someone had the good sense to preserve for us all!Honest reviews on Monsters Crash the Pajama Party: Spook Show Spectacular (1960)
This DVD provides hours of great spooky entertainment, ideal for Halloween parties or when you are simply in the mood for horror hijinks. Terrific trailers, shorts, ads, 3-D, & a cool feature w/ Richard Carlson certainly provide loads of bang for your buck. It all comes together to provide an excellent example of those live spook shows of yesteryear. The menu, which some have complained about, is a gas. It is set up to lead you through a haunted maze where you don't know what will pop up around the next corner. For me, this is Something Weird's finest hour. Hours of fun are provided with superior quality presentations of dated material. One from the vaults, I must recommend it to all horror fans.Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Monsters Crash the Pajama Party: Spook Show Spectacular (1960)
Gear up, this is a long one.I bought this disc a few weeks ago, but I only recently had the time to sit down and watch it. First of all, you must understand that I am crazy about this sort of stuff. I am too young to remember when midnight spook shows played across the country, but I love getting my hands on anything having to do with them. I love the cheesiness and the spin that promoters would put on these things, and wonder what it would have been like to actually sit through one.
So after reading all these negative reviews, I confess I don't understand their frustration. People's first complaint: the lack of a menu. Another reviewer got it when they said that it's supposed to be like finding your way in a haunted house. Click here or click there, you never know what it's going to be! I loved finding all the icons on the DVD and figuring out where stuff was hidden. If you have a decent memory or just write down the location of your favorite features when you find them, it's not a big deal. I guess some people want everything handed to them easy, including DVD features. Me, I love the idea of an entire disc of easter eggs. It's a different experience every time, which is the idea behind the old spook shows. Get it?
Second complaint: the Something Weird Video logo at the bottom right on nearly every feature. This is justified, as one of the major reasons we buy DVDs is so we don't have to watch movies with a TV station's ID covering a fair portion of the screen. However, I stopped noticing it after about the first 10 minutes. I'm not easily bothered, but I can see why this would upset other people. As someone above me noted, there are times when it's nearly invisible and times when it sticks out like a sore thumb. Hopefully SWV will correct this in future releases.
Third complaint: the quality and artistic merit of the content. Are you kidding me? The whole point of this disc is that it's a time capsule to a long-forgotten, incredibly cheesy era of American theater. The quality shouldn't be considered here, we should be thankful that Something Weird gave us so much on one DVD! Sure, the "3-D" feature may be somebody's home movies, and the technology may not translate well to television (although really, did you expect it to work all that great anyway?), but I was thrilled to have it along with the two pairs of classic 3-D glasses. One by one, here's what I think of the content:
The hypnoscope opening I loved it. It got me in the mood, just like it was supposed to.
Monsters Crash the Pajama Party title feature To the reviewer who said it was unwatchably bad, you're wrong. Sure, the extended opening bit with a gorilla acting out the parts of everyone involved in the making of the thing gets a little boring, but the show itself has wonderfully bad acting, pointless sound effects (does a university professor's office always sound that windy?), and many moments of unintentional hilarity. I laughed several times and enjoyed it immensely. Besides, it's interesting to see a relic from the "live monsters grab a girl from the audience" days.
Asylum of the Insane in 3-D Boring, overlong, and cheaply made, but hey, free glasses!
Spooks-a-poppin' Trailer Show I absolutely loved this feature. For some reason, I can't get enough of drive-in intermissions and spook show trailers. I was sad that I got only 45 minutes. Sure, a few images and themes pop up over and over, but if you're like me, you'll be fascinated by the eerie music and the outrageous claims that all these hucksters made to draw in crowds. Fascinating.
Spooky Musical Soundies Charming, odd, and one of the most entertaining inclusions, these things play like ancient music videos. And who doesn't love a dancing skeleton in heels?
Horror Home Productions These clips are some of the more interesting bits on the disc, and it's a shame that there's no information on them included anywhere. The musical accompaniment by Something Weird band The Dead Elvi fits the images and the mood nicely.
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark educational short A random thing to include, but it's worth watching for its time capsule appeal and insight into our earliest PSAs.
Spook House Ride A home movie kind of clip showing the sights inside a carnival haunted house. Cheap and charming.
Drive-in Werewolf The guy's muttering as he "transforms" had me howling with laughter, but the clip is cut short. Seems to be added as an extra purely for extra's sake.
Stills Gallery 300 rare posters and lobby cards tracked with radio-spot promos from the time. Very cool to look at, but a click-through option would have been nice. The feature rumbles through each picture at its own pre-set speed.
How to Put On Your Own Spook Show Informative and useful, for me anyway. A step-by-step guide to pulling off a few simple tricks.
Tormented feature a 72-minute film from 1960 with predictably lousy acting and story, although the direction hints at occasional greatness. A few scenes are genuinely impressive.
Secrets of the Spook Show enclosed booklet A great read, and short enough to be read in a few minutes. Jim "Mad Doctor" Ridenour shares his story of how he became, as those in the business called it, a ghostmaster.
There are other hidden snippets scattered about the menu. They're mainly there to fill up space (in fact, two of them are shorter clips of material found elsewhere on the disc), but a few are so unexpected and strange that I laughed upon first discovering them. In any case, they add to the DVD's surreal nature.
As stated above, those who reviewed this disc negatively either didn't understand what Something Weird was going for with their execution, or got hung up on mostly trivial issues. While I've never had the opportunity to attend a real live spook show, I believe that this disc accurately presents the strangeness, randomness, and humor that characterized so many of them from the 30s to the 60s. There are some things that could have been done better, but hopefully, Something Weird will correct them in the next Spook Show Spectacular, which I'm hoping very much they make. I recommend this DVD highly, and hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.
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