A new week and a new theme to go along with it. This time we are doing a week of monsters and creatures that stalk in the darkness. This time we start off with a horror comedy that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets old school schlock. There is a special place in my heart for the comedy horror movie since they almost always rely on the tropes of horror to be funny.

Sophie is about to turn 18 and her friends want to throw her an absolutely massive party. Jess, her crush, will be there but so will her friends which tease Sophie constantly. The real problem comes when an unexpected guest crashes the party and brings along a host of her monstrous buddies. Now, Sophie needs to confront the horrors from her past and find out the truth about what happened when she was a child in order to help save her friends. Using her mother’s Book of Monsters, they will need to formulate a plan, study their weaknesses, and kick some monster ass. (I am available for ad copy)

The whole thing is very Buffy, as I mentioned before, with Sophie coming from a line of monster slayers and needing to accept her destiny and all. However, it has a lot of blood and guts but absolutely no budget for the monsters. And when I say that I mean, like, no budget. One of the monsters is just a guy in a plague doctor mask and another is some garden gnomes with monster teeth glued to them. The silly nature of the monsters is one of the things that I’m sure it’s banking on for the comedy but I don’t think it hits the target quite the way that they might have hoped, especially because the titular book itself has these gorgeous monster illustrations and then you see a guy in a blanket with a horse skeleton head poking out.

The movie is fun to watch, at least, since it seems to be having a good time itself. We gleefully jump from murder to murder as we introduce new monsters to chop up our ever shrinking gang of high school students. The characters are fun to watch and having a lesbian main character was nice. I do wish that they had actually done more with the book as far as finding unique weaknesses and quirks is concerned. They essentially only find one weak spot on a monster and from then on they take out monsters by just hitting them real hard with weapons. Kind of sad to see the main conceit of the movie go so underused.

In all, I think it’s fun and easy to watch. Makes for a good party movie where you can have it on in the background or get together and actually watch it.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5