"I'm not addicted to drugs, I'm addicted to glamour!"
When I first saw a clip of Seth Green wearing a blood spattered wedding dress, shrieking into flashing camera bulbs, all while listing off the sure-fire ways to make yourself famous (in the Paris Hilton sense), I thought. . . "oh! a comedy!"
Party Monster unfortunately, is no comedy. Is it funny to see Dylan McDermott in an eye patch? Yes. Is it hilarious to watch Macauly Culkin run around in platform shoes and little more than a hospital mask. Absolutely. But it's not funny in the classic sense of humour, so much as it's funny because you're too shocked to really be appalled.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that Party Monster is a BAD movie, per se. Did I think the acting was terrible? Yes, I don't care how many critics lauded these performances. I don't care if it was meant to be over the top, or avant garde. To me it was just much too much to come across as even the least bit convincing. It was hypersexualized to the point where even I, the most outspoken fag-hag I know, actually felt the movie was a little "too gay." It seemed like straight actors doing their most outrageous impressions of the gayest men they knew. It was gay to the power of 1000.
More than anything, it was the best advert for anti-drugs that I've watched since Spun. I don't expect to find myself in a k-hole any time soon, probably moreso now than when I first watched the movie. It's a grim depiction of excess, and the fallout of a lifestyle devoted solely to seeing, being seen, and doing it all while as high as humanly possible.
The ridiculous lifestyle of New York's "Club Kids" are further investigated in Party Monster: the Shockumentary, the video on which Party Monster is based, both films having been directed by the same pair. Watching the documentary it is easy to see that very little creative effort needed to go into the film. Dialogue is taken directly from footage of Michael, James St. James and the rest of the Club Kid revolutionaries. Scenes are created frame by frame exactly as they were (the illegal subway party, for example, is almost impossible to differentiate between reality and fiction). The characters have been made better looking, one expects so it was easier to show to a mass audience, but the story remains unchanged.
These outcasts created a disturbed and grotesque environment, in which they were their own underworld gods. Morphing themselves into creatures barely human, often blurring lines between male and female, between gay and straight, they seemed to appeal to the outside world because of the freedom, and carefree winsome attitude they all seemed to possess. But the truth seems to be that they were all equally trapped, trading old internal demons for the chains of vice, and in the process turning their utopian club world into a hell on earth. If you want the full experience, skip the movie and watch the shorter, more intense documentary instead.
Party Monster:
**.5 of *****
2.5 out of 5
Party Monster: Shockumentary
*** of *****
3 out of 5
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