Let’s start with a fact: The Monster Club is technically a movie. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. People speak, things happen, credits roll. But beyond that, calling this thing a “film” is like calling a tax audit a romantic getaway. It’s a ghastly relic from the dying gasp of British horror anthologies—a horror-comedy-musical-what-the-hell-is-this directed by Roy Ward Baker, who once helmed respectable genre fare like Quatermass and the Pit and A Night to Remember. In The Monster Club, however, he hits creative rock bottom and then starts digging with a soup spoon.
Vincent Price and John Carradine star, or rather shuffle through scenes like two wax figures on loan from Madame Tussauds, and even they can’t save this cinematic mausoleum from collapsing into rubble. The whole thing feels like a Halloween party thrown by your uncle who just discovered The Damned and wants to prove he’s “with it,” despite wearing a cardigan and smelling like mothballs and Old Spice.
The Plot, or the Shaky Facsimile of One
The framing story, which deserves an Emmy for Most Unnecessary Existence, opens with vampire Vincent Price biting John Carradine in an alley and then apologizing for it. Yes, we are in the kind of universe where vampires have manners and extend invitations. Price, playing a vampire named Eramus (because of course he is), brings Carradine—playing a horror writer named R. Chetwynd-Hayes—to The Monster Club, which looks like someone tried to convert a Chuck E. Cheese into a punk venue using only papier-mâché and sadness.
Inside this pound-shop Studio 54, monsters awkwardly groove to synth bands while extras in rubber masks spin around like they just chugged two bottles of Robitussin. Between musical numbers that make you yearn for tinnitus, Price and Carradine sit in a booth and exchange stories, each more creatively bankrupt than the last. It’s a horror anthology, sure, but instead of three chilling tales, we get three tepid farts in the wind.
Story #1: The Shadmock
Ah yes, the terrifying tale of… a man with a really unfortunate whistle. The Shadmock is a lonely hybrid monster with a face like a microwaved scarecrow and the whistle of a kettle on quaaludes. He hires a pretty young woman to help around his mansion, and—shock of shocks—she’s using him to rob the place. But when he finds out, he whistles at her, and her face melts like a candle in Satan’s sauna.
This is meant to be tragic. It isn’t. It’s like watching Beauty and the Beast if the Beast was a depressed groundskeeper with sinus issues and the Beauty was a sociopath who read the script from an Arby’s receipt. The twist lands with the force of a deflating whoopee cushion.
Story #2: The Vampires
If the first story was limp, this one is outright anemic. A young boy discovers his dad is a vampire, and somehow this ends in a vampire hunter getting clubbed with a shovel and a sitcom-level misunderstanding. There’s a chase sequence in a graveyard that’s less thrilling and more like a Benny Hill sketch minus the laughs or the cleavage.
We get more Vincent Price here, and while the man is trying—God love him—he’s working with dialogue that sounds like it was ghostwritten by a hungover intern at Fangoria. Price does his best Nosferatu impression while lamenting how misunderstood vampires are, as if this is some kind of supernatural 12 Angry Men and not a horror skit buried under a landfill of mediocrity.
Story #3: The Ghouls
This one’s about a film director who ends up in a backwoods village full of cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. Oh wait, no, sorry, that’s a better movie. This one’s about a film director who ends up in a village full of pasty extras with bad teeth and worse accents. The “ghouls” look like a high school drama club’s attempt at zombie makeup using Elmer’s glue and biscuit crumbs.
He’s warned not to stay overnight, but of course he does, and the result is a 20-minute sequence of people glaring, moaning, and moving at the speed of jury duty. There’s an escape attempt, a rescue, and a final twist that could only surprise someone who’s never seen a movie, read a book, or interacted with other humans.
The Music: Kill Me with a Synthesizer
Between each story, we return to The Monster Club, where bands like The Pretty Things and The Viewers perform songs so generic they make elevator music sound like Hendrix. These aren’t rock anthems. These are contractual obligations dressed in fog and latex. Imagine if Top of the Pops had a Halloween special produced by someone who had never listened to music or understood why people dance.
The dancing monsters—if you can call them that—flail around in rubber masks like they’re trying to escape an invisible wasp. The effect is less “party of the damned” and more “drunken furry convention in a condemned bingo hall.”
The Effects: Bargain Bin Blood and Greasepaint Wounds
The monster masks? Dollar store quality. The gore? Virtually nonexistent. The makeup? It looks like it was applied with a trowel and a blindfold. This was 1981, for God’s sake. An American Werewolf in London was released that same year and showed what practical effects could do when handled with artistry and ambition. The Monster Club responded by slapping silly putty on extras and hoping for the best.
It’s not campy fun. It’s not low-budget charm. It’s just lazy. This isn’t the scrappy brilliance of Evil Dead or the creativity of early Peter Jackson. This is a lukewarm casserole of studio notes, tired gags, and missed opportunities.
Vincent Price Deserved Better
You watch this and ache for Vincent Price. He’s magnetic, eloquent, and still somehow having a good time, despite being trapped in what feels like a Halloween episode of The Love Boat gone wrong. His reading of a closing speech about how “monsters are people too” is delivered with such pathos it might have meant something—if the preceding 90 minutes hadn’t been a dumpster fire on roller skates.
Final Verdict: Stake It and Forget It
The Monster Club is not so bad it’s good. It’s just bad. A horror comedy with neither horror nor comedy. An anthology that makes you nostalgic for actual anthrax. A collection of half-baked tales stuffed into a nightclub full of fever dream flailing and musical numbers nobody asked for.
Roy Ward Baker, who once made great genre films, goes out not with a bang but with a long, wheezing sigh. And somewhere in the corner of The Monster Club, a guy in a werewolf mask adjusts his fake nose and wonders if the paycheck was worth it.
Rating: 1 out of 5 melting Shadmocks
You’ll find more terror and pathos in a haunted vending machine.
