Film Reviews

Party Monster

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Chloe Sevigny
• Details: US / 98 minutes / (18).

In what is being heralded in some quarters as being his first 'real' adult performance, Macaulay Culkin plays Michael Alig, a Midwestern kid who decides to head to New York in an effort to 'make it' in the hedonistic 1980s. It's there the bisexual young man soon becomes a well known organiser and finds himself feted as the unofficial king of a social scene. This semi-fictionalised account, based on James St James' book (a scene stealing Seth Green); 'Disco Bloodbath' tells how Alig played the club scene before a senseless murder destroyed everything.
I can to admit that there is a certain voyeuristic novelty in watching young Mr Culkin - in a former life the spokesman for bratty children everywhere - ingesting vast quantities of narcotics and professing his love for another teenage drag artist. But novelty is just that, a temporary loss of taste, and neither Culkin nor his directors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, are smart or gifted enough to exploit the space this grants them. The fact that Bailey and Barbato have already made an infinitely more interesting documentary on Alig doesn't seem to have helped them capture anything of the essence of the characters, and their film is spare with its intelligence in its pursuit of gaudy authenticity. How 'Party Monster' can be seen as redemption for Mr Culkin is beyond me as he's tense, dull and emotionally constipated here. It's worse than a 'Richey Rich' and 'Home Alone' double bill. And that's just plain nasty.

Review by Garreth Murphy