Dir. Michael Davis, 2003, USA, 90 mins
Cast: Eric Jungmann, Justin Urich, Aimee Brooks
Imagine we're in some alternate universe for a moment in which the Farrelly Brothers had made Jeepers Creepers. The result would be something like Monster Man, which embraces its trashy eighties gore-fest roots as warmly as it does the more recent teen gross-out phenomenon. Considering Jeepers Creepers was in itself a homage/rip-off of backwater hellholes seen in Duel and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the premise is starting to wear pretty thin.
The Monster Man of the title refers to a monster-truck-wielding psychopath who terrorises unsuspecting motorists and then borrows their limbs for satanic porpoises (or purposes; one of the two). It's bad enough that dweeb Adam has to put up with his obnoxious friend Harley as he drives to his ex-girlfriend's wedding but then they're forced off the road and have to search for help. Almost immediately they find an abandoned van and in a burst of ingenuity Harley starts to suck out the petrol from the tank...except he's sucking on the septic tank and gets a mouthful of something far worse than petroleum.
Back on the road the boys again encounter the monster truck and quickly realise they are being toyed with. They pick up luscious hitchhiker Sarah and things are starting to look up as she chooses shy virgin Adam over sex-mad Harley, but a certain truck is far from finished with them...
This is childish trash of the highest order, but somehow manages to make you go 'ewww' or laugh out loud at regular intervals if you're willing to go along for the ride (witness Harley running for his life from the chasing truck only for Adam to shout at him to lose his clogs so he can run faster). The gory effects are also of a surprisingly high standard, ranging from mangled corpses being tossed about in the back seat of Adam's car during a chase ("Get it off me! Get it off!") to the casting of real amputees to make the horror of the victim's wounds all the more believable. There's not particularly anything new here, and Aimee Brook's hitchhiker is pure male fantasy stereotyping, but at least the film offers a couple of twists in the tale and has more blood than a vampire's bloodbank on Give Blood day. Monster Man is more Dead End than Evil Dead, then, but if you go with some mates on a Saturday night then you'll probably enjoy yourself.
Tom Ramsbottom
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