(wr./dir. Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato)

This has been low on my “rave movies to watch” list for a while now; it got queue-bumped via Waltpaper’s new Club Kids book just coming out.

This movie tries to float telenovela-level production quality and an apparently insufficient budget to do justice to the source material’s costuming, set, & era requirements on Himalayan-peak levels of campiness and bizarre casting (Culkin; Sevigny; Seth Green; John Stamos; 90s procedural law show The Practice’s Dylan McDermott). The total effect is something like if there were such a thing as a bad Gregg Araki movie shooting for “novelty movie.”

I’m pretty sure the novelty factor is why Culkin said yes to this one; novelty, schtick-y, anti-stardom stuff that’s still “about” the idea or dream of celebrity distorting beyond its limits seems to be his thing. Not a critique: I feel that Culkin’s “I’ve got Home Alone money so I’m gonna just do my thing & be me” approach is lovely, even when the results aren’t for me, and especially because they’re so obviously primarily supposed to be for him. Imagine if every celeb acted this way, instead of trying to continue accumulating power or building a brand; I don’t know that pop culture would be any better, but it would certainly be weirder.

It’s important to note that the “monster” part of Party Monster is way over-sold – the killing that occurs here is a minor part of the story. What this “is” is a bad movie about drug problems, not a bad movie about an evil murderer club kid, just like Trainspotting is not a movie “about” a baby that dies due to negligence. If you’re interested in anything else Party Monster is ostensibly about, it’s a pretty disappointing pass; there are better movies on all fronts. For “young people with an NYC heroine problem,” see Heaven Knows What (2014); for club movies Human Traffic (1999) or Beats (2019); for club-adjacent “crazy” movies Vibrations (1996); for young, queer, and partying during the apocalypse, I know I’m always talking about it, but Araki’s Kaboom (2010); for young, queer, outcast, and dancing in NYC, Paris is Burning (1990); etc. What Party Monster does have is “Macauley Culkin and (suddenly halfway thru the movie) Chloe Sevigny as vamping drug addicts taking a bath together,” and “Macauley Culkin constantly burning a pouting Seth Green.”