Movie Details
| Title: | Mad Monster Party | |
| Director: | Jules Bass | |
| Year: | 1969 | |
| Genre: | Animated | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 05.02.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 05.02.07 | Netflix | I have the Alamo pre-show to thank for turning me onto this. A late 60s Rankin-Bass feature-length stop-animated movie starring Boris Karloff, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolfman, Dr. Jeckyll, Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, The Creature from the black lagoon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, King Kong, a zombie that looks and sounds like Peter Lorre, and Phyllis Diller as a hag. Yeah. I really wish I grew up watching this every year because it's pretty cornball for me now but I can imagine totally loving it if i saw it at age 6. I really loved just looking at all the famous Halloween monsters when I was a kid and here they are all together moving around and dancing to skeletal Beatles playing awesome 60s pop Monster Mash-esque tunes. There's really only a few things holding the movie back from being absolutely perfect kiddie inspiration. 1. a lot of time is spent with some normal human guy who's boring. 2. there's weird musical segments where people sing about being in love or whatever and that's boring. 3. they all die at the end! what kind of party is that!? That's bullshit! There is a hot redhead who falls in love when the boring human slaps her though, so that's cool (although maybe a mixed message to kids). But it's all so ghoulish and morbid and fun and great. I really would've gone nuts over this 20 years ago. I'm still really amazed to find out that it exists (and that I've never even heard about it before)... if it was just a bit less corny and maybe 15 minutes shorter I'd go nuts for it now, but it's pretty clearly a children's movie. If and when I have kids though, this will be mandatory viewing. As a personal aside, since I didn't know about this when I was a kid, I fell in love with the Night on Bare Mountain segment of Fantasia. Disney would air this Halloween special every year that was a collection of spooky cartoons and it'd always end with this segment which I thought was maybe the best thing ever. I liked the singing skeletons and the Goofy meets the ghosts stuff too but nothing beat those rising spirits and awesome-looking devil guy. Man, I love halloween. |
