It's very self-aware and probably too arch. But the effortless and inventive weaving of zany surfaces with the more sobering truths below makes the film worth seeing.
Comment
08/19/03
Party Monster (2003)
26
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:73
Fresh:19
Rotten:54
Average Rating:4.3/10
Consensus: The lurid display of camp soon turns tedious.
Runtime: 1 hr 39 mins
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis: With PARTY MONSTER, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE) rework their 1999 shockumentary into a feature film. Based on the book by James St. James, PARTY MONSTER tells... [More]
Starring: Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Wilson Cruz, Chloe Sevigny
Director: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato
Reviews for Party Monster
It's camp, trashy and altogether too silly for its own good, only proving that 23-year-old Culkin is far from leaving childish things behind.
08/27/03
Top CriticIt's Green who, despite his straight-man role ... steals the show, with a performance of controlled engagement with both the delights and damage of the kids' lifestyle.
11/04/03
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09/06/03
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12/30/06
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06/24/06
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01/15/04
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05/24/03
Top Critic[Culkin and Green's] assortment of vocal tics, nervous laughs and over-the-top 'nancy-ness' often are very funny and appropriately giddy.
09/04/03
"... equal parts freakish fashion show and tawdry melodrama of the rise and fall of a superficial celebrity."
11/13/03
It's a cinematic party, one long, strung-out bash that starts out as a novelty and turns into something resembling forced fun before morphing into a bummer.
10/17/03
Culkin and Green, both just as fabulous and pretentious as they can be, pull it off.
09/06/03
[Culkin's] performance in Party Monster is so embarrassing one doesn't know where to look. (Well, perhaps at the exit.)
09/05/03
The story is boring and tragic, but never so tragic that it stops being boring.
10/24/03
It takes some doing to make a potentially epic cultural moment seem smaller than life, but Bailey and Barbato have pulled it off.
09/19/03
In the end you don't believe what you're watching, and you don't care.
09/04/03
Call it what you will, a morality tale, a cautionary fable, one walks away with a sense of catharsis
08/25/03
Culkin acquitting himself all well and good, its going to be Seth Green that commands that transition spotlight into the next phase of his career.
02/07/03
It doesn't live up to the wild times it portrays - the only thing I got from this movie was an idea for a really scary Halloween outfit.
11/07/03
Hedonism deserves better representation.
10/23/03
Latest News for Party Monster
August 23, 2005:
In Other News...Natasha Lyonne, Brad 'n Jen, and Kirsten 'n Jake
According to the NY Post, American Pie star Natasha Lyonne is in the intensive care unit of New York's Beth Israel Hospital, where she is receiving treatment for Hepatitis C, a... More...
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