Main cast: Sam Strike (Casper), Brandon Micheal Hall (Dodge), Kian Lawley (Elliot Dawson), Virginia Gardner (Iris), Erin Moriarty (Alexis Dawson), Robin Tunney (Roxanne Dawson), Julian McMahon (Patrick Dawson), Chester Rushing (Cameron), Jamie Ward (Jeremy), Lance Reddick (Milo), Diego Boneta (Ollie), Sofia Castro (Becca)
Director: Chris von Hoffmann
Casper, Dodge, and Iris are three young kids who specialize in conducting break-ins and thefts that would make any heist coordinator proud. Alas, Casper isn’t getting to enjoy his ill-gotten gains much, as his father is a gambling addict that keeps falling in with the bad crowd. Poor Casper has to keep bailing that useless turd out of one expensive mess after another. When that man ends up on a crime boss’s pay-up-or-die list, Casper and his friends plan to rob a mansion while posing as the hired help during a party.
Oh boy, little do they know that the Dawsons are throwing a little get-together for their fellow reformed serial killers as well as their counselor-mentor Milo, who is also a reformed serial killer. Most of them are buckling under the pressure to behave, especially the Dawson kid Elliot and some of the guests, as their reformation is forced unto them. All it takes is a little temptation to murder dangling before them before they snap, and lucky for them, there are three such temptations in the party today…
Monster Party on paper sounds like a great premise for a cat-and-mouse thriller, but unfortunately, the end result is a tonal mess. Director and scriptwriter Chris von Hoffmann doesn’t seem to know what this movie should be, so the whole thing ends up trying to be everything and end up being nothing of note. The tone shifts abruptly from comedy to more serious thriller to back again, often without proper transitioning of tonal shift, to the point that it’s hard to take the movie seriously.
It wants to be comedy – and Julian McMahon certainly chews the scenery enough – but it never really pushes over the edge to deliver some killer punchlines. It wants to be a terrifying movie, but there is never really any credible sense of danger here, not even when people die. Because of the jarring tonal shifts, I often find myself waiting for sarcastic one-liners to deflate any scene that threatens to be genuinely frightening, and sometimes the one-liner comes, sometimes it doesn’t. This movie seems to be confused about its existence, and I end up being similarly confused as well.
An intriguing arc emerges late in the movie – something about how when you hang around monsters long enough, you become one of them – but that one is barely developed well enough to be of any impact. There is no lead-up or foreshadowing of any sort – wham, it just happens.
Really, Monster Party would have indeed be a monster of a party in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it. How odd that the director-cum-scriptwriter of this movie isn’t that person.
