Party Monster: Critic Reviews

[A] muddled, sometimes touching movie.

The wanton fabulistas of Party Monster are as boring and insignificant as the very 'normals and drearies' they so contemptuously deride.

Never goes deeper than what you might get out of Dr. Phil on a bad day.

It takes some doing to make a potentially epic cultural moment seem smaller than life, but Bailey and Barbato have pulled it off.

The film is ultimately more a C.A.K.E. partyer's failed fetish object than a keg partyer's new Sid and Nancy.

[Culkin's] performance in Party Monster is so embarrassing one doesn't know where to look. (Well, perhaps at the exit.)

A mess.

You haven't seen this many outrageous costumes since the Halloween parade on Cedar Springs.

In the end, for all the vibrancy, there's not much there there. Maybe that's the point, but I doubt it.

Alig is played by Macaulay Culkin, in his first movie since Richie Rich (1994), and it is a fearless performance as a person so shallow, narcissistic and amoral that eventually even his friends simply stare at him in disbelief.

In the end you don't believe what you're watching, and you don't care.

It's the drunk-guy- at-the-party syndrome: The only one truly entertained by the clown with the lamp shade on his head is the clown with the lamp shade on his head -- or folks similarly inebriated.

As wasteful an example of indie-picture indulgence and incompetence as you're likely to find.

A colorful, lurid and ultimately so-what look at some rather obnoxious personalities careening down their little road to ruin.

Culkin may be 24, but he still seems in the throes of the sort of awkward adolescence that dooms so many child stars.

There are many ways of depicting an innocent's descent into hell, but the camp approach is surely the least advisable.

Gracelessly executed, it throws out mock documentary, fantasy sequences and rapid montages, but still drags on woefully, and looks like it was soaked in dirty water.

If I hadn't had a professional obligation to stay until the end, I'd have disappeared faster than the coke that's snorted up Alig's nose.

Most will be turned off by the filmmakers' fatal attraction to the very excesses over which they supposedly are shaking their heads.

This film feels fake, forced and indigestible.

A bold and engrossing drama.