Main cast: Lyndsey Craine (Sophie), Michaela Longden (Mona), Lizzie Stanton (Beth), Daniel Thrace (Gary), Rose Muirhead (Jess), Anna Dawson (Arya), Steph Mossman (Pandora), Arron Dennis (Carl), Julian Alexander (Brice), Nicholas Vince (Jonas)
Director: Stewart Sparke
Book of Monsters has its origins as a film backed by Kickstarter donors, hence it still carries with it a whiff of poverty. Still, low budget flicks are more of the norm than exception in the horror genre, so this isn’t a mark against it. Sometimes it can even be a badge of honor, especially when this one also boasts some occasional good gory practical effects. It’s just that everything else about the movie falls under U for underwhelming.
Here, we have an unpopular high school girl that has a crush on the Goth-like rebel girl in class. This only subjects her to mockery from the obligatory mean girl character. When her father decides to throw her a birthday party, the mean girl plans a prank on our heroine, but things take a turn worse than Carrie, when ancient evils are unleashed and start killing off the guests in lovely, gory ways. This is linked to the heroine’s mother being some kind of demon slayer that, for some reason, left her book that serve both as a manual of demons and the means to slay them as well as a means to summon these demons out in the open for anyone to play with.
On one hand, this one is notable in that it has a pair of lead female characters that have a crush on one another, and this is treated in a non-creepy and even at times realistic manner. However, these “teenagers” all look way too old to be in high school, for one, and most of them never develop any better than basic stereotypes. Sure, you can argue that secondary characters in horror movies are better off as kill count than anything else, but this flaw also applies to the main characters. When this movie reaches its end, I still have not much of an idea whom half the remaining survivors are or even their names. Yes, I don’t even know or care to find out what the main characters’ names are.
The problem here is that the movie spends quite a bit of time building up the main characters to be going somewhere, only to then drop the ball and have these people run around trying to avoid getting killed instead. Hence, characters that seem to be meant to be important end up getting killed in shockingly casual ways. This feels more like a tease that ends up wasting my time; it’s probably better then that the movie just started the gore fest ASAP instead of leading me on like this.
Also, while the initial gore is pretty good, the gore in the later parts of the movie feels rushed and even incoherent. I suspect that the folks ran low on funds while reaching the tail end of shooting and had to make do with whatever they had left. Hence, the bewilderingly anticlimactic showdown with the villains that had previously been built up as near-impossible to kill – being anticlimactic is likely the cheaper way to go, just like in real life when you put out to a cheap date and find only disappointment at the end of the day.
Book of Monsters has the embryo of a good story here, but what came out in the end after all that gestation is more of let down.
