Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer (2008) Starring Trevor Matthews, Robert Englund & Rachel Skarsten Directed by Jon Knautz Written by John Ainslie, Jon Knautz, Trevor Matthews & Patrick White

Your anger is a gift. - Zach de la Rocha

Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer juxtaposes Punch Drunk Love hero Barry Egan with Van Helsing. The titular hero in this story is Jack Brooks (Trevor Matthews), a man, who in his youth, saw his family slaughtered by some Stephen Crane-type creature while camping in the woods. As an adult, Jack is riddled with emotional complexities. He's unattached in his relationship. He's unable to maintain a calm, rational demeanor for more than a few minutes. At the slightest provocation, his temper swells and he speaks in jabs. His efforts to maintain an aura of a complete person fail. He's a terrible plumber. His attempt to quell his anger by way of counseling works only to infuriate him, further. He can't even make it on time to a Chemistry class his girlfriend is making him take at the local Community College. (In his defense, learning for the sake of learning is about as sad and worthless as the elderly.)

Robert Englund enters the storyline as Jack’s professor who has recently acquired a long forgotten house on the hill. The plumbing needs work. Jack is a plumber. You see where this is going.

It's not long before a mishap involving a leak and an ancient heart buried in the ground pit the Professor against the Plumber. The monsters the title promises us emerge: The internalized demons Jack is trying to fight become a tangible threat. Let me just say, I have tremendous respect for the creature effects in this movie. Rather than go with flat CGI, everything on-screen is real. (Never has so much make-up and latex been used since my last relationship.) Likewise, instead of opting to keep the creatures as shadowy figures obscured by the dark - the monsters are shown right from the get go and in broad daylight. For me, showing the quality of the creatures from the start establishes this world as a throwback to a hybrid of the Universal monster flicks, and the 80's tongue of our generation. It was compelling. If the producers had kept things under bad lighting and computer-animation, I wouldn't have made it past the half-hour mark.

The first half hour does drag. In the first moments, we're introduced to a world were monsters jump out at any moment. Then we peter through too much development in characters that isn’t merited. It's not that difficult to sit through. As I stated earlier, knowing that this is a straight-up monster movie, we know there's much more to come. It's just that the wait is a little too long. (I'd liken it to going to a good restaurant that's a little out of the way.) The performances are solid, throughout. Trevor Matthews as Jack Brooks wears the role of a man pissed off at everything, well.

In Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, Henry Fonda takes six pratfalls in no less than three minutes. If you're not looking for it, you wouldn't even notice. His movements are so fluid, that when added to the fact that we don't know Fonda to be physical in his method, the result is practically subliminal. Robert Englund works in that same vein. I'll be completely honest; I immediately dismissed him as being cast for the sole purpose of allowing the producers to say, "Freddy Kruger is in this movie." Wrong! Englund gives one of the most well-attuned, physically comedic performances I've seen in quite some time. His final transformation into a hybrid of Chet from Weird Science and Jaba the Hut is easily the most impressive moment in the movie.

Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer isn't so much a horror movie for people who love horror movies. It's a monster movie for people who love monsters. That sentence might not make sense to some, but it makes sense to the people that have poured liquid latex on their friends' heads.

This movie, ultimately, is for you.