How To Kill Monsters

Monster Mash

How To Kill Monsters
Directed by Stewart Sparke
UK 2023 Dark Rift Films
Screened 25 August at FrightFest, London

Well now. I was really hoping for a nice, light hearted gorefest of a ‘pick me up’ for my second helping of FrightFest this year and, on first appearances from the trailer and synopsis, it looked like this might be what I would be getting with How To Kill Monsters. The director said some good things about it being just a fun, gory movie with no political messages before the movie started and... probably said some equally good stuff a the end of the movie (alas, I didn’t stay for the Q&A... the movie had made me quite melancholic with the state of modern horror and I just wanted to get home by that point).

So the film is billed as a comedy horror but, I didn’t find it either funny or frightening, truth be told... I’ll get to that later.

The film has the ‘to be admired’ audacity of taking a very familiar genre cliché and running with it to make it the whole of the movie, rather than just a twenty minute sequence of a story. The cliché in question being when the surviving protagonist of a science fiction or horror movie (or, you know, that lovely genre mix of the two) turns up and gets arrested by the police because they think he or she (in the case of this movie it’s a she) has killed a load of people and won’t listen to his/her crazy story about an alien/monster/cyborg/robot or ‘insert other appropriate killing machine’ responsible for the slaughter of those around him/her. Then, while they are still trying to process the character through and build a case against him/her... the monster/robot/mad axe murderer (what have you), turns up to continue the slaughtering spree with the constabulary and their assorted prisoners... as the local law enforcement and the prisoners, together with the former main suspect (who now becomes the one with all the knowledge due to previous experience), all team up together to fight said slaughterer, with results that usually end with the death of almost everyone except the original protagonist.

So there you go... that’s the set up for this one in a nutshell and it pushes that genre cliché front and centre and explores it as a feature length story. It has some nice acting turns from the likes of Lyndsey Craine, Arron Dennis, Fenfen Huang, Daniel Thrace and Juné Tiamatakorn, is relatively intense and suitably bloody, making good use of practical effects (yay, no crappy looking CGI blood here, for sure) and, despite the fact that I had a generally lukewarm reception to it, it keeps the momentum going at a fair lick for the majority of the story.

That being said... I didn’t find How To Kill Monsters scary (not sure it was supposed to be, to be fair... it’s one of those gory, body count kinds of movies) and, well, maybe I have lost all my sense of humour lately but I just didn’t find myself smiling even once throughout the film’s running time. And, yeah, I get it... humour is very subjective and just because I didn’t find it funny it doesn’t mean other people won’t. Case in point, the four girls sitting on my right for the screening were just eating it up and loving every minute, laughing a lot and generally having a good time with it. I’m pretty sure though, by the looks of things, that at least two of them (or more) were actually part of the cast too so, yeah, maybe that’s to be expected.

All in all, sorry for the extremely short review and I really didn’t want to be having to say this but, so far this year I’ve seen two out of two duds at FrightFest. Still, I have a few more to see yet over the next couple of days* so I’m keeping optimistic as to what lays ahead. This one, however, wasn’t for me.

*Spoiler alert... the next movie I saw at FrightFest was absolutely sensational.