Movie Reviews
Jack Brooks: Movie Slayer
Greg Kaczynski |
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 Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer begins promising enough: audiences get a tribe of face-painted natives with spears and feathers fighting off a ferocious Cyclopean nightmare. It’s ludicrous and sets the viewer up for a lively B-movie romp full of big rubber monsters and gore galore. However, the 50 minutes following this opening gambit stumble and fumble their way through a barely coherent plot full of uninteresting caricatures, finally finishing up with an over-the-top special effects extravaganza rarely seen in this day and age.
Those 50 minutes of dead space, though, are incredibly tough to get through.
Jack Brooks (Trevor Matthews) is a kid with anger issues, but unlike most kids who come from a broken home or are bullied throughout their childhood, Jack is angry because his family was devoured by a monster one night years ago. It’s sort of his fault, but more the fault of his silly little sister and, really, mostly the fault of the crazy cannibalistic monster that was hiding in the forest that night.
In the years since, Jack has pushed the memories of this tragic night to the back of his mind, and sits on the fragments of the unfortunate incident, a powder keg ready to blow at any minute. He’s a part-time plumber and part-time student at some kind of weird night school for socially underdeveloped twenty-somethings that apparently only runs one class: Professor Crowley’s (Robert Englund of Freddy Krueger fame) chemistry class.
Jack’s got a girl who he doesn’t really like, but another guy (James A. Woods as a bizarre stoner-type) does like. There seems to be a couple nerds and some cool chicks in the class. It feels a lot like high school, but…it’s not.
 One night, Professor Crowley asks Jack to come check out the plumbing at the creepy old house he’s living in. Jack does, and through a convoluted series of happenings, accidentally tears open the ground to release an ancient evil that had been buried years ago.
The evil seeps out of the ground in the obligatory creeping mist form, possesses Professor Crowley and doesn’t really do much more than make Englund eat a lot and puke from time to time for a large chunk of the film. Eventually, the evil within Crowley has been fed enough, and the poor professor is transformed into a true embodiment of evil, all fat, slimy and ready to possess many many more innocents. Yawn.
Jack Brooks is full of conventions audiences have seen before, and seen done far better in such genre fare as Evil Dead II, Creepshow and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. It feels like the producers came at this film with a 60-page script and were struggling to find ways to fill the extra 25 pages.
The acting is generally stiff and amateurish, and the lighting and set designs are flat. Jack Brooks can’t help but come off as a student film. Many of the characters are embarrassing caricatures, whether be it through the writing or the direction. Either way it doesn’t matter, as the result is still the same. Oh, and the first time viewers see Jack, he looks totally different from how he does in the rest of the film. Maybe that was a directorial choice, but here it just seems lazy and confusing, like most of the movie.
 Unsurprisingly, Jack Brooks is somewhat buoyed whenever Englund is on-screen. Though he isn’t given much to work with, the 61-year-old actor (60 when Jack Brooks was filmed) still has incredible chops when it comes to delivering corny lines and physical humor. Honestly, the physical hurdles he clears are quite impressive, and as someone who grew up watching Englund prance around as the demonically jolly Freddy Krueger, I was incredibly pleased. Englund chews the scenery as a true and tested professional. Even if his only direction is to vomit up pasty-looking oatmeal for the fifth time, he attacks his role with glee and an energy missing from the rest of the cast.
That is, except for David Fox. The only other shining gem in this film is the relatively unknown Fox who plays Howard, an elderly man who runs the neighborhood hardware store. The scene between him and Jack when he tells the history of the cursed house provides a fantastic showcase for Fox’s comic ability.
Fox and Englund run circles around their youthful co-stars, and it’s a shame that neither one of them played the titular character. The two old-timers understand comedy and timing, taking such cheesy fare and actually making it work for them and the audience.
 Jack Brooks’ special effects, while often rough and goofy, are a nice break from the ubiquitous CGI that runs rampant through so many modern horror films. The obese tentacled demon who appears in the film’s third act is especially satisfying.
The sad news is that no amount of campy special effects and talented veterans can save this boring, predictable retread. The humor generally falls flat, the movie absolutely lacks any and all suspense and the so-called plot is merely a string of events loosely connected through the character of Jack Brooks. The only hope for this film is to become an ironic late-night cult classic, though the bar for such films is set higher than Jack ever reaches.
Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer is now playing at Laemmle Sunset 5.
For more information, visit jackbrooksthemovie.com.
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