Questionably Content

Jack Brooks Monster Slayer (2008)

Directed by: John Knautz

Starring: Trevor Matthews

Other Actors of Note: Robert Englund

Plot: As a child Jack Brooks witnessed the brutal murder of his family. Now a young man he struggles with a pestering girlfriend, therapy sessions that resolve nothing, and night classes that barely hold his interest. After unleashing an ancient curse, Jack's Professor undergoes a transformation into something not-quite- human, and Jack is forced to confront some old demons... along with a few new ones. Taken from www.imdb.com.

You might wanna get that looked at.

"Jack Brooks Monster Slayer" is probably one of the best movies about nothing I've ever seen. But I'll get to that later.

Jack Brooks (Trevor Matthews) witnessed his family murdered by some sort of blue werewolf thing when he was a kid and ran away. As a result he's been a seething ball of rage ever since. Anyway, Jack's bitchy girlfriend makes him take a night class at the local college.

One night after class Jack's teacher Professor Crowley (Robert Englund) mentions that he has come into possession of a nice old house because some freaky shit went down there in the past. The problem is that the pipes don't work so Jack goes and fixes them and accidentally wakes up some ancient evil and pretty soon everything goes to shit and Professor Crowley gets possessed and digs up a crate full of bones.

In this crate he finds a still beating black heart and just like that dumbass in "Jason Goes to Hell" he decides to swallow it. Then he turns into that thing that Bill Paxton got turned into in "Weird Science" and turns most of the class into weird cyst-covered zombie things. Naturally Jack grows a pair and kicks ass.

I know, I pretty much just gave away the entire thing but that only IS the only plot this movie has to speak of.

Like Ash with his chainsaw, Reggie with his shotgun, Ripley with that kick-ass machine gun thing comes Jack Brooks with... a motherfucking pipe. Jesus Christ, even Gordon Freeman at least had a fucking crowbar.

Well the other chracters are so forgetable that I can't even remember any of their names so we're only going to be talking about two performances.

Trevor Matthews does well for a low-rent actor. This is his 4th movie (I won't even mention the other 3 as there's no way you've heard of them.) Jack Brooks is sort of a cross between Earl Hickey from "My Name is Earl" and Jay from "Clerks." Matthews' performance is rather good, but his line delivery is a bit stale. Of course this could simply be attributed to the type of character he's playing, Jack plays as a soft spoken good-ole-boy with an attitude problem and that's really what Matthews comes across as.

Now Robert "I can't play anything but Freddy Kreuger" Englund. Englund is considered horror movie royalty but I'm still not sure why. He's a one-note actor who can pretty much play only one character well with a few mediocre at best notable appeareances in things lilke "V", "The Mangler", and "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane." This is one of those. He's entertaining but little else.

"This is the first time I've been entertaining in decades!"

Now one of the most surprising thing about this movie is how good the effects are. All the effects are conventional, not CG, and it works surprisingly well. It's one of the few dimension extreme titles that looks somewhat polished.

That being said, the best effects are the least utilized. The film starts out with some sort of cyclops thing that conjures up nostalgia for the old "Beetle Borgs" TV show. However it looks great. The problem is after we see it we go back to Jack's Childhood where we see a mediocre blue werewolf thing and then the big bad of the movie being some freaky zombie things and the big blob thing neither of which are particularly impressive for this day and age. (To be honest they wouldn't even look that impressive for the 80s)

So the best looking monster is the one we never actually see Jack fight.

Having tackled the Power Rangers, Rita Repulsa now focuses her monster on their new target: Jack Brooks.

The above pretty much sums up how the movie is. It banks far too much on potential that it never reaches. We start out with Jack, looking a lot like the guy with the dredlocks from "Stargate: Atlantis" getting ready to kick some cyclops ass, then we go back to the story of how he got there.

It's a nice explanation but the movie reads more like the first issue of a comic series than a movie and that's a problem. As a stand-alone film it's pretty weak, as part of an established series it could work but the problem is that that series just doesn't exist yet.

Certainly it's a quirky and fun idea making a movie that seems like a mash-up of "Super Mario Bros.", "Beetle Borgs", and "Hellboy" but it never really comes to fruitition. It's more of a felling of "it will be good" as opposed to "it is good."

It's a fun movie but that's about it. It has no plot, no memorable characters apart from the hero and the villain, and while it's far form unenjoyable it just seems to be missing something.

"Dude, don't look now, but that chick is totally giving you the eye."

"Jack Brooks Monster Slayer" is a fun, campy, nostalgic movie that will bring out the immature violent side in you that loves watching weird zombie things getting their heads splattered with pipes and slimy phallic tongues.

I give "Jack Brooks Monster Slayer" a 3 out of 5. It may look better as part of a series but as of right now it's just worth a rent.