Monster X – review

Director: Patrick Rea (segment)

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers

This is another portmanteau film that takes short films previously produced and offers them a wraparound. The result of this is, of course, that the short films contained within change in filming quality and timbre but this one answers this by having the portmanteau set in a horror film festival that has multiple screens showing films.

The wraparound was rather well done with a couple on a first date – she not too enamoured of horror films, he an old hand with the genre. As the wraparound continues the films start to come to life.

getting to the festival

The problem with this is that the films we see are not actually the films allegedly shown. So the first film Banshee is about the Irish spirit/faery but in the theatre it is more a Japanese ghost type that appears. The film about monsters generally we see at the end occurs as they hit a cinema filled with the audience turned into (Romero style) zombies. The fact that the werewolf short (set in a movie theatre) coincides with someone turning into a werewolf in the wraparound therefore feels more luck than judgement!

fangs

This brings us to the vampire short (and a mention that there is no vampire presence in the wraparound) entitled Now that You’re Dead and by the link you’ll gather it is a short that we have already looked at on TMtV. Which brings me to a quandary… I actually stopped scoring short films but am still scoring portmanteau/anthology films based on the worth of the vampire segment. To get a sense of the short please read that article but I can say it stands up to a second watch and is still fun (though the twists are known). 6 out of 10 and the other shorts, and wraparound, were fun too.

The imdb page is here.