MONSTERS OF CALIFORNIA - Mark Reviews Movies

Monsters of California, Screen Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2023

A character eats six pot brownies at one point in Monsters of California, and one thinks of that old advice that writers should write what they know. If that's the case, this surely isn't the first movie that was written under such an influence, but it might help to explain how so something so vapid but convinced of its own significance came to be.

The story is basically a simple throwback to the kiddie adventures of the 1980s, in which a group of young friends suspect some mystery, go looking for answers, and discover something beyond their imaginations in the process. The "kids" in this movie, as they're referred to at least once by a character who should know much better, are 20-something slackers and stoners, who still live in their childhood homes, don't seem to have any real ambitions for themselves now or their future lives, and exist in a state of such arrested development that one might suspect the director misinterpreted the script and hired actors who are too old for these roles.

As it turns out, the director is one of the screenwriters, so there goes that theory out the window. This is the feature debut of Tom DeLonge, who also co-wrote the script with Ian Miller, and it's an introduction that certainly makes an impression. How does a filmmaker take something so straightforward and filled with potential fun but do just about everything wrong with it? It happens, for sure, and it happens here, too.

The story revolves around three friends, with Dallas (Jack Samson), whose father disappeared a few years ago under mysterious circumstances, as their de facto leader. It's definitely not Toe (Jack Lancaster), because he's the guy who eats those loaded snacks while behind the wheel on a long road trip, so his leadership potential is about as low as he is constantly high. The other pal is Riley (Jared Scott), who exists in this story, too. One imagines DeLonge and Miller decided the group needed some balance between the alleged intellectualism of Dallas and Toe's shenanigans, and sure, a nothing of a character definitely fills the space on screen between the other two.

The plot has Dallas discovering his missing father's past, working for a secret government agency that tracks and records paranormal/extraterrestrial activity. His uncle (played by Casper Van Dien) is officially in the Navy but really wants a device that his brother might have had—one that detects the exact locations of any supernatural things going on nearby. Dallas finds it, decides to hide it from his uncle, and goes on a camping trip with Toe, Riley, and a young woman named Kelly (Gabrielle Haugh) on a camping trip to look for what might be a Sasquatch in the woods.

By the way, Dallas and Kelly meet once before she decides to go on a weekend trip with one relative stranger and two other complete ones, but don't worry, because it's not as if Toe and Riley aren't also creepy around Dallas' younger sister and mother. We have to ignore or forget a lot of things for this movie to barely function. DeLonge and Miller certainly do, such as on one occasion when Dallas tells Kelly that he has never seen a ghost before—even though the opening scene has him and his buddies going to a haunted house, making a ghost appear, and capturing it on camera.

The whole of the narrative feels thrown together in such a haphazard way, as if the screenwriters started with an idea about how supernatural occurrences are real and just threw a bunch of them, a conspiracy plot, and the premises of some old movies they once saw together, hoping for the best. It's meant to be a comedy, if a scene of Bigfoot urinating in Toe's mouth—for an extended period of time that makes one think the guy might be secretly enjoying it—or another of Toe crashing into a UFO is any evidence, but as for evidence that's not particularly funny, there are those two scenes as prime examples of the humor. Plus, Richard Kind is misused—but still a beacon of something worthwhile—as the scientist who knows why all of this happening.

Worse than all of that, though, is the dreadfully serious—and just increasingly dreadful—insistence that Monsters of California has some really insightful things to say, man, about religion, the government, and how, deep down, we're just all really the same. Which number brownie made that seem to be the most intelligent thought imaginable?

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