Spoilers. There's no monster and very little walking.
The good news is that this week I finally got out of the silent film period. For those of you not up to speed, I'm watching 50 classic horror movies in chronological order, so up until now it's been guys in white face-paint and lipstick pantomiming.
The bad news is that my introduction to "talkies" is The Monster Walks. I knew this film was going to be an ordeal when I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and saw it had 4 out of 10 stars.
Bad call, Rotten Tomatoes. Bad Call. That's at least 5 more stars than this movie deserves.
Here's the premise. A spoiled wasp inherits a bunch of money from her dead father whom everyone agrees was always thoughtful and just. Also he did perform strange experiments on chimps. A fact which, oddly enough, doesn't really come up later in the movie.
He was always a thoughtful and just man . . . I mean, except for when he was performing his experiments . . . dark experiments . . . experiments that twisted the forms of nature into unholy abominations that made you question the existence of God. But you know . . . other than that he was a pretty chill dude. A great guy to grab a beer with.
So this Dr. Mendele wannabe dies and leaves his fortune to his blonde haired, blue-eyed daughter. The cast is as follows:
A Spoiled Wasp Lady
The World's Dumbest Doctor
Some Dude
Two Shifty Germans
Dr. Strangelove
Some Dude
An Awesome Monkey
...oh, and Will Smith's Grandpa
West Philadelphia born and raised . . . playing comic relief in Jim Crow Era movies is how I spend most of my days.
If you take a glace at the cast, I think you'll see the first problem with this film; this is clearly supposed to be a sitcom. Just think about the possibilities. However, somewhere along the line someone got confused and tried to make it into a horror/comedy/murder mystery/chimp movie. The end result is that The Monster Walks does all of those things poorly.
It should be noted that Will Smith's grandpa and the chimp try pretty hard to save the film, but the rest of the cast drags them down into their B-Movie hell nonetheless.
The only good that I can possibly see coming out of this movie is that King Kong (1933) comes out a year later. It's almost like the producers of King Kong watched The Monster Walks and thought "What an absolute steaming pile of buffalo shit. Surely someone can make a movie about a killer ape that's better than that." Then the King Kong Producers went out and made a movie that didn't make people lose faith in humanity.
I can only hope that someone out there digs a pit deep enough to bury every copy of this film and then erects port-a-potties over it.
Toss the DVDs in here boys, right next to the old ET Atari cartridges.
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