BARGAIN BIN REVIEW
Reviewing the movies
no one else will touch.
no one else will touch.
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MONSTER MAN
* * * (2003, 95 minutes, Rated R)
Monster, monster man! I wanna be, a monster man!
Talk about a swerve: We kick off with the opening credits accompanied by that sound all the cool
horror flicks just love these days, and go straight to a guy getting his head crushed in a vice. We
then spend the next hour in a Kevin Smith film.
Seriously. Bland wussie Adam is taking a road trip to crash the wedding of an ex-girlfriend he's
still hung up on. Tagging along -- more or less against Adam's will -- is his buddy, Harley, who
comes off as the Diet Coke version of Jack Black. The first third of the movie is almost entirely
spent seeped in Clerks-esque banter: Diet Jack Black carries on about how much of an awful slut
Adam's ex was, oogles women like a 13-year-old, makes a variety of genital jokes, etc. If you've
ever caught an episode of Reaper, the relationship between the two is almost exactly like that of
Sam and Sock.
Even after Diet Jack Black shoots his mouth off in a hick bar and the two are run off the road by a
mon-- no, it's more than a monster truck, it's like something out of Road Warrior -- it takes an
additional half hour for the two to realize they're in a horror movie. You might thing this gets old,
and for a while, it does. But over the course of the movie, particularly after a hottie hitchhiker
causes some friction between the duo, their act gets a bit more depth and the characters do start
to grow on you.
The action builds nicely, and even when we discover that the monster truck is driven by a
monstrous-looking man with a mouth stitched together in a most impractical manner, this turns
out to be a much better movie than it should be. There are even a few good twists. And then... we
get the Torso-less Man of Exposition.
It feels like a cop-out, because it is a cop-out. Dear Potential Scriptwriters: If you need to have a
character explain your whole ingenious plot like a second-tier Bond villain, you're doing
something wrong.
Yes, even if that character is lacking a torso.
* * * (2003, 95 minutes, Rated R)
Monster, monster man! I wanna be, a monster man!
Talk about a swerve: We kick off with the opening credits accompanied by that sound all the cool
horror flicks just love these days, and go straight to a guy getting his head crushed in a vice. We
then spend the next hour in a Kevin Smith film.
Seriously. Bland wussie Adam is taking a road trip to crash the wedding of an ex-girlfriend he's
still hung up on. Tagging along -- more or less against Adam's will -- is his buddy, Harley, who
comes off as the Diet Coke version of Jack Black. The first third of the movie is almost entirely
spent seeped in Clerks-esque banter: Diet Jack Black carries on about how much of an awful slut
Adam's ex was, oogles women like a 13-year-old, makes a variety of genital jokes, etc. If you've
ever caught an episode of Reaper, the relationship between the two is almost exactly like that of
Sam and Sock.
Even after Diet Jack Black shoots his mouth off in a hick bar and the two are run off the road by a
mon-- no, it's more than a monster truck, it's like something out of Road Warrior -- it takes an
additional half hour for the two to realize they're in a horror movie. You might thing this gets old,
and for a while, it does. But over the course of the movie, particularly after a hottie hitchhiker
causes some friction between the duo, their act gets a bit more depth and the characters do start
to grow on you.
The action builds nicely, and even when we discover that the monster truck is driven by a
monstrous-looking man with a mouth stitched together in a most impractical manner, this turns
out to be a much better movie than it should be. There are even a few good twists. And then... we
get the Torso-less Man of Exposition.
It feels like a cop-out, because it is a cop-out. Dear Potential Scriptwriters: If you need to have a
character explain your whole ingenious plot like a second-tier Bond villain, you're doing
something wrong.
Yes, even if that character is lacking a torso.
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