Monsters of California

This movie is a waste of your time. I can't believe I wasted $4.99 on renting this. I wouldn't have watched it for free had I known how crappy it was. It's a shame too because the story could have made a decent enough movie if it had been done well. First, the actors are bad, the silliness part of the movie is misplaced like Bigfoot peeing on one of the characters and the over the top ghostly stuff, the pacing and poorly built up suspense are all just sad. This could have been so much better had the filmmakers taken the subject matter seriously instead of just one big bad joke that wasn't even funny. It's like they couldn't decide if this was a comedy, a drama or supernatural suspense. If they didn't know then how is the audience supposed to know what to make of this?

I came across this movie while browsing UFO threads on Reddit. It seemed to hide clues and revelations about the whole UAP and alien affair.

Well, imagine watching a bad episode of Scooby-Doo, minus the dog, with four teenagers stumbling upon mysteries they generally escape from by literally running away. So, the first survival lesson: run.

The dialogues, moreover, are nothing short of comical. Forced humor and comedic pauses, including the old stoner friend trick.

The funny thing, though, is to notice how some dialogues are actually meant to be revealing: the movie changes its mood, and you witness a dialogue pasted there, almost randomly, that seems like a script taken from some conspiracy-minded mind.

I have a soft spot for Casper Van Dien, so I said I would watch this film. He's in it just for a few scenes, though. The rest is a bunch of really cute guys and girls going in circles in a film that makes no sense. Come for Casper and stay for the bikini models.

The entire story circles around a teen boy who wants to find out what happened to his dad. His friends and him are active paranormal hunters and then they discover a tech MacGuffin left there by the missing father, which then leads to aliens and other random stuff. Meanwhile you get the most pointless personal dramas, like his (very hot) mom dating and then preparing to get married and then deciding to move the family to another city. Don't worry, none of this has any relevance to the story at all.

I thought it would be a fun "young group of boys go on an adventure" thing. But everybody is either too old for this kind of plot, or too young to take seriously. And the movie is so bad... Ugh!

So I managed 49 minutes of this slacker scifi adventure? /comedy.

It had a good idea in the beginning but limped along and wasn't really sure what it was going to be maybe a comedy nah nothing funny here!

The cast were amiable like a noughties scooby doo gang but minus the doo.

The legendary casper van dien makes a appearance as naval intelligence men in black kind of character but he is sorely wasted on a lacklustre script and plot. Scowling through his lines.

Do yourself a favour watch the first twenty minutes ghost house segment then cut and run you won't miss anything else noteworthy.

So to sum up scifi no, comedy no, adventure definitely not, the four stars are for the leads sister in a bikini see where I'm going with this just blah blah blah!!

I'm not sure how to review this movie. It's not a badly made movie. It's well shot. The acting ranges from fine for a low budget movie to fairly good. The sound is fine. The effects are a bit cheap looking but not bad for a low budget movie. I have certainly seen far worse.

The movie just never comes together into anything. There's some philosophical stuff. There's some UFO stuff. There's a conspiracy. None of it ever gels together into anything much. The middle just kind of meanders around. The ending doesn't amount to much of anything. None of it adds up to much of anything. The sum is less than its parts.