Review of Party Monster (2003) by Todd J — 28 Apr 2008

Whereas your average actioner asks you to come to see human beings being hurt in one way or another, Party Monster's main feature is the sheer amount of drugs done by its protagonists. It's rather hard to comprehend just how much coke, crack, ecstasy, heroin, meth, etc.

can be done by such a small group in such a short amount of time. Sadly, that's about the extent of my recommendation for Party Monster because it pretty much is Macaulay Culkin (who, if you remember, came back from the dead with this title for some reason) and Seth Green living hedonistically in New York and becoming club kids who basically show up for parties and are fed drugs and money.

Although the film tries its hardest, it never really goes anywhere in terms of taking a position on the characters' views or their actions other than to give a picture of the lifestyle. That's all well and nice, but when there's no trajectory other than an uninteresting murder subplot thrown in that adds nothing to none of the characters but instead wraps up 100 minutes of tedium, well, I'd say you've pretty much failed at your job as a filmmaker.

Considering that the directors had already tackled this material in a mockumentary of some sort in the late 90's, it seems like they wanted a new project and just decided to milk their optioning of the book written about the scene.

As a scene, I have to say that I find the Club Kids utterly uninteresting. Some may be able to find pleasure in their pretentious "excess leads to wisdom" philosophy or the drag, but the whole thing is just handled so poorly.

Sadly, Mac and Green lack the minute amount of chops needed for these roles, which leads to the whole thing resembling an audition full of college drama majors rather than an attempt at grabbing realism.

There's a few pretty good scenes including a sidesplitter involving Mac and a buddy looking for an imaginary crack rock. However, such scenes are lost in a stew of poor filmmaking (the thing looks like it was shot and edited, and hell, written by a 4 year old) that leaves only the prolific partying to garner any interest over the "hell, it's on IFC.

What else do I have to do?" mentality. ** out've *****.