How to Kill Monsters

The costumes are freakishly bad, the acting weak, the plot a watered down rehash, but there's enough good jokes in the same vein of Sean of the Dead to be worth watching this movie.

If the movie had abandoned efforts to be a horror movie and just stuck with the comedy this would have been a great movie actually. It's when it pretends to be serious that you start to yawn and thinking the parts worth watching are over then comes another batch of laughs, but only enough to keep you going to the end.

So it's well worth watching, especially if you liked Shaun of the dead. As a horror movie keep on going. This is a T as in trash it not even worthy of being a B or C flick in terms of horror.

Director Stewart Sparkle's 2023 feature film is a kind of follow up to his earlier film 'Book of Monsters'. On Halloween Jamie (Lyndsey Crane) is found in a cabin in the woods with a chainsaw, covered in blood, and with her friends chopped up all around her. Taken to a police station for questioning she claims it was a monster from the beyond wot done it. But then - with police laughter still ringing in her ears - strange things start happening. Written by Sparkle with Paul Butler this is a gore filled supernatural monster horror comedy, which fortunately doesn't take itself too seriously. Hokum, with some rather annoying cops - one of them played by Johnny Vivash (him again!).

On Halloween, at a cabin in the woods, there is a party going on, and the star attraction is an ancient relic, the Eldritch Blade. By aligning a series of coded symbols, it is activated, and let's say, one really doesn't want to activate it. It summons monsters, among other nasty stuff. It is low budget, and the monsters are done practical, more or less as they would have been done in B movies of the 1960's. Men in rubber suits with tentacles and gaping mouths. The CGI is less than what could be done in a middle school film class. Anyway, out from the cabin comes Jamie with a chainsaw. Everyone else in the cabin is dead, and she is the main suspect. She tries to tell them what happened but the police don't believe her. There are dumb people, some slapstick, but for the most part rampant silliness. Not great, but silly fun.

It's a comedy-horror in which some dumb criminals and some even dumber cops must band together to battle Lovecraftian monsters. The lead actress does an admirable job. The effects are very low-budget; they're either practical or "we know you know it's really bad CGI, fuggadaboudit," both of which fit this type of movie nicely.

The problem is simply that the humor isn't funny. The script tries. The performers try. They were clearly going for a mix of madcap wackiness and deadpan British snark. The jokes land a few times (the best lines are already given away in the trailer); the vast majority of the time they just don't, despite the best efforts of an affable cast.

Watched at the film premier at FrightFest 2023 and the film was brilliant, plenty of comedy and horror with more than a splash of blood and guts. ;-)

The is mainly based in the Police station where they think Jamie has killed a load of people in a cabin in the woods.

She is then put into the cells with an assortment of characters, mainly a hen party who are always taking the micky of the officers.

From that point, it is where things get a little freaky and the monsters start appearing and the blood and guts starts flowing.

Some brilliant old school special FX throughout the film.

A brilliant cast too ;-)