A decade after Macaulay Culkin's last screen outing - the abysmal Richie Rich - the former child star is making a comeback. Here he plays a crack-smoking gay killer with a penchant for hotpants, red lipstick, and Andy Warhol.
"CAMP, TRASHY AND SILLY"
For anyone who's wondering how kiddie celebs turn themselves into adult thesps, Party Monster is a 'How-Not-To' manual (Haley Joel Osment and Frankie Muniz, please take note). It's camp, trashy, and altogether too silly for its own good, only proving that 23-year-old Culkin is far from leaving childish things behind.
Based on James St James' autobiographical novel Disco Bloodbath, Party Monster follows St James (Seth Green) and Michael Alig (Culkin), two 'way-out' clubbers. Their passion for drugs, celebrity and disco led to the birth of the 'Club Kids' - a colourful gang of hedonists riding the cusp of ecstasy culture in 90s New York before addiction and murder blew their high.
Wearing its trash credentials on its sleeve, this grubbily shot digital feature offers the quite ridiculous sight of Green and Culkin doing impersonations of gay drag queens in a series of outr茅 outfits. Culkin perhaps hoped that this foray into camp excess would re-brand him a genuine actor. Sadly, it only highlights his thespian deficiencies. Displaying more wood than a Jeff Stryker skin flick, Culkin even manages to make Green's nasally-challenged performance look respectable. Quite a feat.
Clearly believing that nothing succeeds like excess, filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato - who covered this story before in their '98 documentary of the same name - look to be on the verge of delivering a cult movie. Instead, they get waylaid by too many uppers, downers, and in-betweeners to translate the few moments of risqu茅 hilarity - Culkin reliving himself into a champagne glass for Green to sip from - into anything more than a disposable disco oddity.
Party Monster (2003)
