Mad Monster Party

To celebrate the silly spookiness of the Halloween season, the cult classic Mad Monster Party is October’s hilarious — and campy — Cinema Sunday selection. A work of stop-motion animation from Rankin/Bass, creators of the Burl Ives-narrated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and other perennial holiday favourites, the rarely seen Mad Monster Party is one of the funniest — or, at least, punniest — musicals ever made, and features the vocal talents of the legendarily scary Boris Karloff, along with Phyllis Diller, Gale Garnett, and Allen Swift. As the ghoulish story goes, Dr. Frankenstein, determined to retire from the monster-making business, invites an international network of fiends — including Dracula, the Werewolf, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Creature — to join him for the announcement of his successor. When he picks his nerdy, incompetent nephew Felix to take over, it ruffles a few monster feathers (and scales). But something much more momentously evil is at stake: Dr. F has made a terrible discovery — The Secret of Total Destruction — and it must not fall into the wrong hands! Mad magazine founding editor Harvey Kurtzman co-wrote the script; Mad artist Jack Davis designed many of the characters. “Contagiously droll ... This party should make everybody chuckle, the tots and their escorts, and even the monsters at heart” (New York Times). Colour, HDCAM. 95 mins.