Movie Review: Monster Brawl

@TigersMS78 comes off the top turnbuckle…


  One of the coolest concepts I heard of in recent years, emerging from what I assume was that 64,000 dollar question – Who would win in a fight between a werewolf and a vampire? – is the film Monster Brawl. A WWE style fight to see whom is the king (or queen) of monsters.

Setup as a sporting event complete with commentators and dramatic backstories for each of the monsters, Monster Brawl is like every ‘what if’ you have dreamed of (if you’re a teen boy – or just act like one). The scope of the film however is quite limited. I totally get the feel that writer/director Jesse T. Cook is going for and to that end he succeeds with the format of the film which is less film and more sporting event. However I had doubts as to if a 90 minute run time could be sustained for this style of film and unless there were some real surprises in store I had a feeling it was going to run out of fuel – which unfortunately it did. That’s not to say that it’s not enjoyable it is just very predictable.
A lot of the hinges on two aspects the action in the ring and the commentators calling the action, with regards to the latter Dave Foley (as Buzz Chambers) and Art Hindle (as Sasquatch  Sid) deliver the goods, making it pretty entertaining, even if Foley does put on the old style commentary voice which doesn’t necessarily match the feel of the film. The former and for a film called Monster Brawl isn’t crazy enough, it needed to have a harder edge than it did, sure most of the finishing moves (and subsequent Mortal Kombat style voiceover) are pretty brutal – especially in the final fight – I think that it needed to start gruesome and over the top and up the carnage from there.

I really did like the backstory portion before each fight but as mentioned previously when the fighting takes a back seat to the rest of the other events, the film didn’t quite work out. I would love to this kind of flick with a HUGE budget and see what they could do with it but as it was the concept was cool but under developed, if I could see a potential staleness in the film after ten minutes then surely the filmmakers could have as well and addressed it. Having said that, Monster Brawl is enjoyable just not as god as it could’ve been.

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Ryan Morrissey-Smith

Images: IMDB

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