The debut film of John Landis (The Blues Brothers, Animal House), who also wrote and starred in the low-budget comedy horror. A quiet suburb Southern California is being terrorized by a mysterious murderous monster living in a cave. As the bodies pile up — with incriminating banana peels always near by the crime scene — a group of teens stumble on the guilty party: a 20-million-year-old Schlockthropus, an ape-like creature with a sense of the absurd.

A series of loosely connected skits that spoof news programs, commercials, porno films, kung-fu films, disaster films, blaxploitation films, spy films, mafia films, and the fear that somebody is watching you on the other side of the TV.