Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH! on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters. 

Sadly, we will never see this movie in the way it was intended.

Monsters Crash the Pajama Party is a short film designed to have a break where monsters — well, people in costumes — would emerge from the movie and run through the audience before grabbed a planted victim and dragging them back into the movie. Often, it was screened as part of a traveling midnight ghost show that was hosted by illusionist and promoter Joe Karston. It would be followed by a feature presentation.

Karston was also behind spook shows such as Dr. Macabre’s Frightmare of Movie Monsters, Dr. Satan’s Shrieks in the Night and Dr. Jekyl and His Weird Show. There sure were a lot of evil doctors performing for horror audiences in the 50s through 70s.

If the gimmick of having monsters run out of the screen sounds like Ray Dennis Steckler, Karston re-released his films and added those elements. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies was retitled The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary had zombies that ran through the audience. The Thrill Killers was now The Maniacs Are Loose and had a live actor dressed as a character from the movie. And The Lemon Grove Kids had a mummy pop out of the silver screen.

David L. Hewitt had formerly been one of the Dr. Jekyl hosts who had started making movies such as The Time Travelers, Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, Hell’s Chosen Few, The Mighty Gorga, The Girls from Thunder Strip and The Tormentors.

Karston produced this film, which has Professor Williams (Vic McGee) and Police Lieutenant Hudson (James Reason) investigating a haunted house where a mad scientist — with monsters for assistants — takes teenagers and turns them into more monsters.

That night, the kids from a local college sneak in as part of their initiation for a fraternity. They soon meet the Mad Doctor (also McGee), as well as his gorilla assistant, as well as Igor (Charles Hegen) and Draculina (Pauline Hillkurt).  Soon, women are being turned into apes, a werewolf appears, a laser gets shot through the screen and the monsters get loose in the theater.

What an amazing time the past was. I figure that today, people would just laugh at teens in Ben Cooper masks running through the audience. As for me, I can only dream about the experience.

You can watch this on Tubi.