Monster Man starts with friends Adam (Eric Jungmann) & Harley (Justin Urich) travelling across the desert highway to attend a friends wedding. While in a roadside bar Harley insults some of the locals & a short time later while back on the road the two friends are menaced by a large monster truck that tries to ram them off the road. Later that night at a roadside motel Adam wakes up to find some roadkill in his bed & along with Harley jumps in his car & speeds off only to discover stowaway hitchhiker Sarah (Aimee Brooks) in the back seat. They agree to give her a lift & carry on but the monster trucker won't go away & a trail of death & murder follows the three travellers across the lonely desert highway as they are pursed by a deformed psycho killer...
Written & directed by Michael Davis this comic horror film firmly has it's tongue placed in it's cheek & is a bit of a mix of genres & other films that have come before it, while Monster Man isn't a great film I did quite like it & the gorgeous Aimee Brooks helps as does a neat twist or two at the end which I genuinely didn't expect. Monster Man is best summed up as a light hearted comic cross between horror themed road films like The Hitcher (1986) & Jeepers Creepers (2001) & maybe there's a little of the backwoods horror of the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) & Wrong Turn (2003) thrown in there as well. The Harley character is a bit annoying at times & can get on your nerves although some of the comic dialogue is fairly amusing with some reasonable one-liners although there's very little horror in the opening hour or so & it actually felt more like the comedy film Road Trip (2000) before the outrageous horror, gore & silly twists kick in during the last third of the film which is where the majority of the entertainment value came as far as I was concerned. I was surprised that I was surprised that the twist surprised me! At the end of the day & at the end of the ninety minutes Monster Man is a fun modern horror film with an attractive cast, some over-the-top gore & violence & a fairly relaxed light hearted tone which makes it easy to watch & like. Monster Man doesn't have a point, it doesn't try to say anything deep or meaningful & it won't change your views on life or the world but for what it is you could do a lot worse.
Visually the best part of Monster Man is Aimee Brooks. Period. She is very sexy in this & looks great in her skimpy black outfit. I recently saw her in The Mangler Reborn (2005) as well & she's hot in that too. As far as the blood & gore goes there's some good stuff here & none of it's CGI, there's a mangled corpse with it's eyeball hanging out, a guy has his legs run over & squashed & then his head is run over, someone is cut in half, there's a guy with his stomach removed, there's a slashed throat, someone's head is crushed in a vice, eyes are poked out & someone runs into a knife & gets it impaled through his throat. There's one sex scene but strangely there's no nudity. According to the IMDb the monster truck used in Monster Man was built for a paltry $2,500 & it was actually made out of wood rather than metal which was spray painted. Apparently it only had a top speed of 30 MPH & the film was sped up & treated to try & give the impression of speed which it plainly didn't have in reality.
Apparently this had a budget of about $1,000,000 in Santo Clarita in California & the production values are slick enough, it's well made although the CGI monster truck scenes look poor. The gory prosthetic special effects are impressive. The acting is pretty good although Justin Urich as Harley can get really overbearing & annoying at times.
Monster Man is an entertaining & pretty gory comedy horror film that does tend to move around genres too much but there's some good twists & Aimee Brooks is a total babe who I could probably look at all day. Nowhere near the worst film ever & anyone looking for some light hearted horror, gore & fun could do a lot, lot worse.
Written & directed by Michael Davis this comic horror film firmly has it's tongue placed in it's cheek & is a bit of a mix of genres & other films that have come before it, while Monster Man isn't a great film I did quite like it & the gorgeous Aimee Brooks helps as does a neat twist or two at the end which I genuinely didn't expect. Monster Man is best summed up as a light hearted comic cross between horror themed road films like The Hitcher (1986) & Jeepers Creepers (2001) & maybe there's a little of the backwoods horror of the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) & Wrong Turn (2003) thrown in there as well. The Harley character is a bit annoying at times & can get on your nerves although some of the comic dialogue is fairly amusing with some reasonable one-liners although there's very little horror in the opening hour or so & it actually felt more like the comedy film Road Trip (2000) before the outrageous horror, gore & silly twists kick in during the last third of the film which is where the majority of the entertainment value came as far as I was concerned. I was surprised that I was surprised that the twist surprised me! At the end of the day & at the end of the ninety minutes Monster Man is a fun modern horror film with an attractive cast, some over-the-top gore & violence & a fairly relaxed light hearted tone which makes it easy to watch & like. Monster Man doesn't have a point, it doesn't try to say anything deep or meaningful & it won't change your views on life or the world but for what it is you could do a lot worse.
Visually the best part of Monster Man is Aimee Brooks. Period. She is very sexy in this & looks great in her skimpy black outfit. I recently saw her in The Mangler Reborn (2005) as well & she's hot in that too. As far as the blood & gore goes there's some good stuff here & none of it's CGI, there's a mangled corpse with it's eyeball hanging out, a guy has his legs run over & squashed & then his head is run over, someone is cut in half, there's a guy with his stomach removed, there's a slashed throat, someone's head is crushed in a vice, eyes are poked out & someone runs into a knife & gets it impaled through his throat. There's one sex scene but strangely there's no nudity. According to the IMDb the monster truck used in Monster Man was built for a paltry $2,500 & it was actually made out of wood rather than metal which was spray painted. Apparently it only had a top speed of 30 MPH & the film was sped up & treated to try & give the impression of speed which it plainly didn't have in reality.
Apparently this had a budget of about $1,000,000 in Santo Clarita in California & the production values are slick enough, it's well made although the CGI monster truck scenes look poor. The gory prosthetic special effects are impressive. The acting is pretty good although Justin Urich as Harley can get really overbearing & annoying at times.
Monster Man is an entertaining & pretty gory comedy horror film that does tend to move around genres too much but there's some good twists & Aimee Brooks is a total babe who I could probably look at all day. Nowhere near the worst film ever & anyone looking for some light hearted horror, gore & fun could do a lot, lot worse.