Monster Man

A bit of everything here: road movie, buddy comedy, Satanist horror, body horror, hillbilly horror, and gore movie. A young man in love with a girl about to get married decides to hit the road in a designed goal to tell her how he feels but a tag-along numbskull playfully jokey pal thwarts his efforts by enraging a grotesque maniac with a patchwork face, stitched and sewn together in a hideous tapestry of flesh no longer favoring anything remotely human who drives a makeshift monster truck with a body seemingly made out of metal from rusty tool sheds. Got that? To add a little flavor to the proceedings, the two dudes pick up a scantily clad blond chick in knee high boots, teeny tiny mini-skirt, and a barely-buttoned shirt unveiling her petite stomach and belly ring. The three seem to be trying to stay one step ahead of monster man after seeing him run over a prick they encountered in a bar featuring a whole room full of barflies missing limbs. It gets better, it seems a family of badly mangled freaks who should actually be dead are kept ticking thanks to black magic. Yes, this is a movie after my own heart. As warped and blackly comic as it sounds. Quirky, engaging performances (if Justin Ulrich’s Harley is a bit juvenile, obnoxious, troublesome, and flatulent) and a tone aiming to please help to keep the film from getting too unpleasant and unsettling. The bloody violence is so over-the-top, it is borderline comical. 

The end is a bit extreme in its desire to tickle your funny bone and repulse at the same time, with jokes about incest, using body parts cut from innocents bound with their heads caught in a vice, and being dead but alive (a body sans needed organs, a stomach open with his innards exposed, an unflappable man in possession of this wreckage provokes Jungmann’s predicament as he is to be the next supplier to the dead). Monster Man’s ability to withstand all types of punishment to the torso and continue to keep coming at Jungmann, not to mention, how resourceful such a meek little man can be when facing his own demise if he doesn’t protect himself against the maniac all play a part in the off-the-wall finale.

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Aimee Brooks as The Hitchhiker

Aimee Brooks, an actress I know from Critters 3, isn’t that tomboy cutie flirting with Leo DiCaprio by 2004, but a saucy sexpot who aggressively offers to give virginal, sweet geek, Eric Jungmann, quite a thrill in the sack. It is all done, though, without nudity that kind of lessens the eroticism, attempting to utilize Brooks’ attractive little body against Jungmann’s awkward banal reaction to her Yoda-speak while she rides him.