Canadian B-film Monster Brawl falls flat on humour and scares

H.G. Watson
ARTS EDITOR

onster Brawl is a wrestling and horror film fan fiction brought to life. It’s not a good thing.

The entire premise of the film is that famous movie monsters (Swamp Thing, Frankenstein’s creature and the werewolf among them) duke it out in a paper-view style wrestling match. That’s it.

There’s no goal in mind, the monsters don’t win anything (except a rather large champions belt), and there are absolutely no stakes. Dave Foley and Art Hindle have also been roped into being the play-by-play announcers of the match in an attempt to get some laughs.

The problem with Monster Brawl is that it is fanservice veiled under the guise of a film. The basic concept seems to be, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to see a vampire fight a mummy?” And sure, it might be cool. But, that idea doesn’t make a film. Heck, it barely makes a TV movie.

There’s no plot and there’s no real characterization to speak of. Instead it runs like a bad Saturday Night Live sketch that runs for 90 minutes.

If the film were the least bit fun or humourous it would make up for it, but even here it falls flat.

Foley and Hindle do their best to inject some laughs into the proceedings, but after about the half hour point, it becomes the same endless riff on how fun it is to see monsters kicking each other’s asses.

The sole bright spot lies with the costumes and make up effects. The Brother Gore provided the special effects for the film, and using minimal (or none) VFX, they create some pretty great movie creatures, harkening back to the Hammer horror effects. But, it’s not enough to save Monster Brawl.

The Internet has allowed fans to get away with a lot of interesting match-ups. Want to read homoerotic fiction about Kirk and Spock? There’s no end to it, or any other matching that you could imagine.

It’s fun to take these flights of fancy into the “what ifs?’ of fandom as some are even excellently done. But, the reason they remain in the realms of the Internet is because they aren’t often developed much past the base instinct to see what we dream about. What makes a film is the conscious decision to develop characters, plot and setting. Monster Brawl has a cool idea, but never desires to take it past its initial stages.