AllMovie

Monsters Crash the Pajama Party is a slow-witted, but enjoyable time warp that boasts a perfect combination of bad jokes, bad acting, and fake monsters. Unapologetically cheap, the entire film was clearly just a ruse to keep the audience interested until the big payoff, five minutes of blank screen time (with an appropriately "scary" soundtrack and occasionally punctuated by flashes of lightning) which cued a trio of costumed cut-ups to tear through the theater causing mayhem. Monsters opens with a ludicrous address from the mad doctor, who promises that "in a few moments, I will be a lot safer in here than you will be out there!" This is followed by one of the weirdest credit sequences in movie history; the names are read aloud by a bad Boris Karloff imitator while each person's position on the film is clumsily mimed by a man in a gorilla suit. The stars are five pairs of boys and girls, undistinguished except for one fellow who sports an impenetrable, but genuine, accent of some sort. They spend their time onscreen lamely spouting off a variety of laugh lines that range from unfunny to just plain confusing ("Knock it off, or you'll be instant monster!"). From there on, the mad doctor cackles and rubs his hands together, his gorilla slave holds up signs reading "Fantastic!" or "Outstanding!" to express his moods, and both Maila "Vampira" Nurmi and Jonathan Winters' Maude Frickett character are lampooned (or ripped off, depending on your level of charity). It's all a sublimely ridiculous 45-minute show that never takes itself seriously for a second and even seems to revel in the flat failure of its own bad jokes. The credits refer to writer/director/producer David L. Hewitt as "the fearless showman," and that appears to be an accurate statement. Not only was Hewitt responsible for this bewildering achievement, but he was also in charge of a sci-fi revision of L. Frank Baum's most famous book entitled The Wizard of Mars, which certainly took courage to release with a straight face.