Wonderful character development!

Best movie of this year hands down!

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Even though the overall quality level of "Pandemonium" is just average, I don't believe I ever laughed as hard in my life as I did with one of the dumb jokes here. Somewhere in the middle of the movie, there's a scene where an elderly Romanian and superstitious woman bumps into a couple of teenagers running around the house at night. She asks: "Are you frightened of the night?", to which the boy replies: "Baloney!" and then the old lady looks very confused and mumbles in herself: "You're frightened of baloney??". Okay, admittedly this is a really dumb gag, but it was actually so hilarious that I nearly choked in my drink and laughed for five minutes straight. There are a handful more of jokes like this, genuinely hilarious I mean, but also a whole lot of embarrassing moments. Still, in comparison with the other contemporary horror spoofs/parodies – like "Wacko" and "Saturday the 14th" – this one is fairly successful. The opening sequences are in good old-fashioned Hammer Studios style, with Gothic music and (completely irrelevant) images of a traditional castle. Back in the early 60's there was a serial killer targeting the young and obnoxious cheerleaders at a summer camp. He/she killed so many of them that they eventually had to shut down the camp, but now a former employee intends to reopen it. Naturally, the grand reopening coincides with the return of the killer. There are several inventive characters in "Pandemonium", including the Canadian Mountie and his inseparable horse (and I do mean inseparable) and a Carrie who fires off laser beams with her eyes. The film is well- directed, oddly enough by the same guy who made the hugely suspenseful "Alice, Sweet Alice".

This is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen, it's just brilliant! It is full of classic smothers brothers/airplane-esquire humor that you just can't miss. I wish this movie was out on DVD! They don't even have it at any of my local video stores, so I haven't seen it in probably 4 years, when it was on HBO for about a week.The humor is blatant and the plot/script simple, but that just makes it all the better. It is the type of movie you watch when you just want to laugh for about an hour without even the possibility of the humor going over your head, :). It's very clever and witty and is sure to make anyone laugh.I highly recommend this movie, it's a classic. If you can find it, don't pass it up.

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..