Movie Review

Melissa Barrera takes on love and loss in playful dramedy Your Monster

Your Monster

Vertical Entertainment

Actor Melissa Berrera has been on an upward trajectory in the past few years, starring in the rebooted Scream franchise and as one of the leads in the movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. Given its title - Your Monster - and release date, her latest film would seem to be poised to take advantage of the thirst for Halloween horror content.

Instead, it plays more like a dramedy, with Barrera starring as Laura, who as the film begins endures a string of unfortunate events: She’s in the hospital for unknown reasons, her boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan), breaks up with her, and the breakup forces her to move back to her childhood home, with only her friend Mazie (Kayla Foster) for company as her family is otherwise out of the picture.

Just her luck, the monster (Tommy Dewey) who freaked her out as a child is still living there, although now he acts like a normal person instead of some scary creature. While they initially butt heads over sharing the same space, they gradually start to bond, with the monster encouraging Laura - an aspiring Broadway actor - to pursue a role in Jacob’s new musical despite their recent split. Her antagonistic relationship with Jacob and her growing one with the monster each start to color the way she acts.

Written and directed by Caroline Lindy, a first-time feature filmmaker who made a short film version of the story in 2020, the film never seems to settle on the right tone. Laura is initially presented as an over-the-top character, a trait that keeps her at arm’s length when it comes to emotional connection. Slowly, drama, horror, and romance start to be introduced, each to little success because of Laura’s personality and the presence of a monster who’s rarely very monstrous.

It seems like Lindy wants the movie to be kind of a twist on the Beauty & the Beast story, this time with the monster the more level-headed of the two. There are moments when it feels like the film is headed down the right path, but it never quite gets to the intended destination. It’s also hampered by a side plot involving Jackie (Meghann Fahy), the actor chosen to be the lead in Jacob’s musical, creating a rivalry with Laura that fails to inspire.

Another (perhaps unintended) reference is the 1985 Michael J. Fox movie Teen Wolf, whose title character this movie’s monster resembles in both looks and demeanor. The goofiness of having the monster act like a regular human being works well in the introductory phase, but it doesn’t make as much sense as the film goes along. The twists that the story takes don’t really match up what has come before.

Barrera has shown promise in other recent roles, but the choices she makes in this role don’t serve her or the character well. Dewey, who was a stand-out performer in the recent Saturday Night, is fun as the monster, but it’s ultimately a one-note role that doesn’t give him much to do. Donovan also has little nuance in his character or performance, resulting in him being uninteresting.

The premise of Your Monster is one that could have been taken in many different directions, but the one chosen by Lindy turned out to be the least successful. She never gets a handle on exactly what story she wanted to tell, and in the end it’s a muddled, mostly boring affair.

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Your Monster is now playing in theaters.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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