Monsters Review

Well intentioned and "interesting," the low budget and hard-to-pin-down Monsters fails to excite.

Monsters Credit: Magnolia Releasing

Monsters, Gareth Edwards’ independently made road/horror/politico/sci-fi film, gets all the points in the world for trying, but it ultimately comes up way short. It's got all sorts of good ideas swimming around in there, but it is still a bowl of sour soup.

We open with some deftly sketched out world-building scenes: some junk came back from space and infected an area – Mexico, mainly - with giant murderous creatures. The kick is that the creatures only go on devastation sprees occasionally, so life doesn’t completely shut down in the contaminated zone. (Think of it like living on an island that gets hit with a hurricane every year.)

When a rich girl lingers too long in the dangerous area, daddy dispatches an employee (a photojournalist) to bring her back. Problems arise when they screw up their transport and miss the last safe passage out before the “busy season.” Now the privileged Americans are stuck in the third world after dark . . .and that’s when things get serious.

The seriousness comes in the form of giant space squids – kinda like really big, gray versions of the aliens from Galaxy Quest. They rip the place up (but sometimes just glow and hug) and generally make life terrifying. Luckily for America, there is a big security fence to keep us secure.

Secure and clueless, apparently, as key elements of the aliens’ anatomy seems new to our two leads. You’d think there’d be, like, a zillion Discovery Channel shows about these beings, wouldn’t you? This is obviously Edwards working in allegory, however, he shoots himself on the foot. The beginning of the film works so well to create a realistic scenario, only to get absurd at the end.

Unfortunately, the trek is something of an endurance test not just for our characters. The acting is quite poor and the dialogue is trite. Much has been made of the film’s well-crafted yet frugal special effects, but no amount of computer enhancement can fix lifeless scene work.

Monsters is far and away in a different galaxy from the Roger Corman dreck served up on SyFy Network, but alas it is merely a different kind of "not good."