Toronto After Dark! Matt Brown on Monster Brawl

The Toronto After Dark Film Festival made the choices that made sense when coming back for its 2011 season. After an ill-advised move to August last year to beat the TIFF rush, After Dark once again stands astride the chilly back-half of October, ringing in the Hallowe’en new year. Likewise, with the Bloor (still) under reno, the festival has migrated to the Toronto Underground Cinema, a perfect mating of form and content. The Bloor’s a beautiful old place, and served After Dark’s first five years of nighttime screams well – but the Underground was made for this stuff.

And after a year or more of ambling my way through loosely-attended (and downright under-attended) Underground screenings, it was shocking and thrilling to arrive at 186 Spadina tonight to find nothing less than Undergroundemonium in place, and a line of ticket-holders so fat and thick that it snaked back and forth on itself like a bundle of rope. It was a big, strong showing for the first night of the festival, so I’ll acknowledge that the opening night programming – a feature film called Monster Brawl – did its required heavy lifting.

But I wish it were a better film. Toronto-local production Monster Brawl is so clearly an idea more fit for a video game – pitting various Universal monsters against one another in a series of wrestling matches – that it even comes with staccato interjections from omni-god Lance Henriksen on the V/O, intoning “Exceptional!” and “Magnificent!” when the Werewolf lays a particularly good smackdown on the Frankenstein.

As a movie, it’s deadly dull stuff, or certainly is to anyone who doesn’t give a flip about the WWE. Again: Monster Brawl is not a narrative. It’s more of a fake Pay-Per-View event, where the Wrestlemania in question happens to feature the Famous Monsters of Filmland rather than wrestlers. I liked Swamp Gut the best – a repurpose of the Thing, or Swamp Thing, or Some Thing From Whatever – a downtrodden green fatso who ekes out his lonely existence in the bog, and uses his smack-talking pre-match video blurb to howl at the human race about their environmental carnage.

But Swamp Gut gets killed like a chump, leaving us to root for Frankenstein in his fight against the Wolfman, proving once again that audiences will always choose heart over cool. As a formal experiment, Monster Brawl tries something genuinely ballsy: the filmmakers clearly expect, and require, the audience to provide all of the hooting and cheering for the various monsters onscreen… so much so that they never populated their soundtrack with crowd noises of their own. It’s a weird, heady tonal gamble. But the film is too long (80 minutes feels like 200) and endless asides to Dave Foley (playing Howard Cosell) and Art Hindle (playing Zombie Don Cherry) don’t provide near enough pop against the unceasing drudgery of fight after fight after fight.

If the fights were worth something, with stunts or choreography we hadn’t seen before, we might get somewhere with Monster Brawl, but they aren’t and we don’t.

It was all worth it, though, for a chance to see The Legend of Beaver Dam again on the big screen. This might be the best film ever made in this country. It opened Midnight Madness at TIFF in 2010, but I don’t mind the repeat. The retrofitted sound system at the Underground kicked Beaver Dam’s beautiful rock opera - every ghoulish, heavy metal scream of it - all the way to the cheap seats, and the exuberant “That was fucking awesome” from the row right behind me was likely echoed all the way around the theatre. On second viewing, I was much more attuned to how finely crafted the film is – right down to the flickering campfire reflected on Boy Scout Danny’s too-wide glasses (which, intentionally or not, gets replaced by an equally-eerie bank of floodlights in the final scenes of the film). It’s a real marvel, and tells a rich story, and has its cake and eats it too, genre-wise.

One plug before I go. Aside from Beaver Dam, I’ve only seen one other film screening at Toronto After Dark this year, and it’s a doozie – A Lonely Place To Die. I saw this at ActionFest in April, and can’t recommend it highly enough. Die is a perfectly-crafted thriller, and one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and is a much-deserved moviestar turn for the amazing Melissa George. Don’t watch the trailer, don’t read a word about it beyond these. It’s playing Monday night at 9:45, and you want to see it. Go.