The Criminals Become The Victims In ‘Monster Party’

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the thieves from Don’t Breathe broke into a house where one of those high-class parties from The Purge was happening? Well, wonder no more, because that’s the basic concept behind Monster Party.

Monster Party is about a group of cut-rate criminals who plan the heist of a lifetime. Iris (Virginia Gardner from Halloween) works for a catering company, and her newest gig is at a huge mansion in a wealthy part of town. She enlists the help of her friend Casper (Leatherface’s Sam Strike) to disable the alarm system so that her boyfriend Dodge (Brandon Micheal Hall from “Search Party”) can rob the place blind while she distracts the revelers. Their simple plan goes awry when the trio discover that the party, thrown by Roxanne and Patrick Dawson (The Craft’s Robin Tunney and Fantastic Four’s Julian McMahon), is a gathering of recovering serial killers, and they’re just looking for a reason to fall off the wagon.

Monster Party is a much better movie than one might expect from the setup. Writer/director Chris von Hoffman (Drifter) manages to flip the script on the usual home invasion theme by turning the hunters into the hunted, and while it’s a trope that has been explored ad nauseum before, that doesn’t stop this movie from being a lot of fun. What starts out as a suspenseful caper movie (will the anti-heroes get caught?) becomes a shocking, brutally violent fight for life with a gang of bloodthirsty foes (who will survive and what will be left of them?). It’s like a crime movie that turns into a slasher. Neither of those are bad things, and van Hoffman has a good handle on both the visual aesthetics and the narrative nuances of each genre.

There are some flaws with Monster Party. There’s an underlying mystery of a “monster in the basement” that doesn’t really pay off; it just becomes a diversion that serves no purpose other than to raise the movie’s gore factor. And there’s a simmering revenge subplot that tries to boil over in the final minutes, but it winds up just feeling like padding, as if von Hoffman wanted to get his movie up to 90 minutes when he should have just left it at a brisk 75.

But all of this is nitpicky stuff. The bottom line is that if brutal killings and splattering gore is your thing, Monster Party is probably for you. Even with its reversal twist, there’s very little that most horror fans haven’t seen before, but it’s well done, and the whole thing is just plain entertaining.