Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The first time I saw this was as a teenager and now 20 years later it is still just as funny. Tommy Smothers, Carol Kane, a very young Judge Reinhold, and the young man that became Jimmy Olsen in the 1970 version of Superman Marc McClure. If you want a to spend a little time with a movie that is laugh out loud funny and makes you want to take a milk bath (chocolate chip cookies included) then this is the film for you. It is a true culmination take off of all the really good horror movies that you know and love. This movie is also billed as one of Paul Rueben's(Peewee Herman) movies. Tab Hunter as the killer is awesome and who wouldn't like a piece of the furniture produced by the inmates at the hospital. Well, worth a look see especially for those Canadian Mounties!!!

Odd thing about the post/cover art for this: you'd have no idea it was a horror movie at all, it just looks like a straight comedy. I knew it was a horror spoof, though, and watched it almost back to back with Student Bodies (1981), which I feel was slightly better than this one. This almost feels like it was made for TV.It starts off with a shot of the moon, and we see the shadow of a wolf baying on the moon's surface, which is revealed to be cast by hands doing shadow puppets, which become hands grabbing a football pass. Four cheerleaders get skewered by a long javelin toss by a mystery killer, so long, the javelin is more like a heat-seeking missile. It makes a shish-ka-bob of them. This is in "It Had to Be, Indiana" at It Had to Be University (It Had to Be U - I like Bullwinkle's Whattsamotta U better).Years later, a woman reopens the cheerleading school. Each of the new students is introduced by a caption "Victim #1," "#2," etc. Exposition is accompanied by an "Exposition" caption, then "Still More Exposition" etc. A bit weak. Student Bodies relied on captions for humor too.Isabella Telezynska plays a character spoofing Maria Ouspenskaya's Maleva character from Universal's The Wolf Man, offering a warning in rhyme about pompoms. Carol Kane plays a Carrie-like psychic girl raised by an oppressive mother.Meanwhile, a driller killer who turns his victims into wood furniture somehow has escaped from prison, and a madman wearing a mask has escaped from an asylum and they hit the road together. The madman's doctor is in pursuit.Tommy Smothers is the local cop, a Royal Canadian Mountie, for some reason, who has a horse with a circle painted around one eye, and a deputy or servant played by Paul Reubens, doing his Pee Wee Herman voices and laughs, but behaving surly.The deaths are not quite as odd as in Student Bodies, but there are a lot of them. There are a number of good actors in this movie (like Donald O'Connor and Phil Hartman) who are on screen for so short a time, and given so little to do, often stupid, that they are wasted.There are some funny lines in the movie, and it is just funny enough not to be a total waste of time.

This is one of the funniest spoof movies ever made! It has tons of references and people you would see on something like *before they were stars..the films they want to hide* The air tokyo and the furniture references are great! Godzilla as a stewardess..who knew? In fact, I am watching it now! Definately worth seeing if only for it's cheesiness..

"Pandemonium" is a horror movie spoof that comes off more stupid than funny. Believe me when I tell you, I love comedies. Especially comedy spoofs. "Airplane", "The Naked Gun" trilogy, "Blazing Saddles", "High Anxiety", and "Spaceballs" are some of my favorite comedies that spoof a particular genre. "Pandemonium" is not up there with those films. Most of the scenes in this movie had me sitting there in stunned silence because the movie wasn't all that funny. There are a few laughs in the film, but when you watch a comedy, you expect to laugh a lot more than a few times and that's all this film has going for it. Geez, "Scream" had more laughs than this film and that was more of a horror film. How bizarre is that?*1/2 (out of four)