REVIEW: Mad Monster Party (1967)

Out of all the movies that I knew I was going to be reviewing this holiday season, the one that I was the most excited about was Mad Monster Party. The other Rankin-Bass stop-motion cartoons that everyone knows -- "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman," "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" -- were absolute staples of my childhood; I can't remember a year when I didn't watch those. If my family happened to be sitting together in the same room during the holidays, it was probably because one of those was on. You can probably imagine my excitement when I found out that not only did the Rankin-Bass team do a HALLOWEEN MONSTER stop-motion cartoon, they did a FEATURE-LENGTH one!

Sweet Jesus Christ on crutches, this was the longest, hardest ninety minutes I've sat through in a long, long time. I can barely describe the suckitude of this picture in words; I might have to do a finger-painting with my own blood. The only way I can accurately portray the agony of sitting through this is to actually make you sit through it, but I think we'd all be better off pretending that this doesn't exist at all.

This odious piece of entertainment takes mostly takes place on Monster Island, a mysterious Caribbean Island that's ruled by Dr. Frankenstein, played by the venerable Boris Karloff. In the opening, the good doctor discovers a potion that causes things to explode, and declares that he can retire now that he's discovered the secrets of the creation and destruction of life. I guess he never heard of TNT, or chainsaws, or guns, or nuclear bombs, or heroin, or falling from great heights, or blood loss, or the bubonic plague, or watching Mad Monster Party more than once. I thought the destruction of life was the easy part, but I guess things work differently in the animation world.

Since Dr. Frankenstein feels like retiring and living the slothful life, he decides to pass on this great secret formula to his only true heir: Felix Flanken, his nebbishy nephew (shades of the elf that wanted to be a dentist in the "Rudolph" special). Being a smart guy, Dr. Frank comes up with the idea to call together a meeting of the world's greatest monsters to announce his departure from running their coalition. Invited are: Count Dracula, the Werewolf, Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein's own Monster, and his Bride; also attending are Frankenstein's assistant Francesca, his lead butler Yetch, and his crew of skeleton and zombie waiters. So far so good! It sounds like a great time!

Unfortunately, almost the entire thing is flat. Dead flat. Unforgivingly flat. Maybe it's because this was one of the first of the animation specials that they made, but the timing is off, and the writing is deader than a corpse. (Believe me, the jokes in MMP are worse than my "deader than a corpse" gag.) The jokes are not funny, and when they happen to have a little spark it's ruined by horrible, horrible pauses and stutters where the animation has to catch up to the punchline. In the beginning, Doc Frankenstein mentions that he's not inviting the "It" monster to his party, because...something about being a "wild bore" which pun-ified into carrying "wild boars." The joke was so shitty that even I didn't understand it, and I have a Master's Degree in bad jokes from Mad Libs University. (Which is a fully accredited four-year NOUN, by the way.)

If nothing else, the character designs were pretty neat. Doc Frankenstein looked a lot like Karloff himself, and the other creatures looked like suitably stylized versions of their movie counterparts. The one exception is the Monster's Bride (called the Mate in this for some bizarre reason), which is designed to look like Phyllis Diller (who lends her voice to the role). Diller, actually, is probably the one high point in the movie. She acts exactly like the Phyllis Diller that we're used to, except that this time her weird post-joke laugh comes off as an act of defiance against the horrible jokes that the writers gave her. Normally, I'm not one of her biggest fans, but she did make me laugh in this. Once. The only other time I laughed is when Dr. Jekyll first turns into Mr. Hyde, and immeeeeediately smashes a window that he happens to be standing next to -- as if he was somehow instinctively drawn to smashing that specific window.

Aside from those two bits in this sea of drivel, every second of the film dragged on like fingernails across my eyeballs. I gave this movie its entire running length to engage me in a manner other than hatred, and it let me down. This is a boring, stupid, sloppy movie, filled with stupid, unconnected musical sequences, poor animation, and jokes that would make the Cryptkeeper ashamed.

You can avoid this one next October.