Review: Monsters of California – “a good Saturday night popcorn flick”

Directed by Tom DeLonge
Starring Jack Samson, Jared Scott, Jack Lancaster, Gabrielle Haugh, Casper Van Dien, Richard Kind

Blink 182’s Tom DeLonge directs and co-writes this fun flick, which clearly draws on a lot of his own interests – UFOs, cryptids, ghosts. Dallas (Jack Samson), is drifting, hanging out with his best friends Toe (Jack Lancaster) and Riley (Jared Scott), getting high and chasing phenomena. The film opens with the trio in a supposedly haunted house, setting up equipment and trying to summon a spirit, or perhaps a demon (they’re really not very sure about what exactly it is or what they are doing, but they do it anyway), which leads to an enjoyable silly opening sequence.

You soon get the impression that Dallas is pushing his friends to these activities, partly because he’s inherited some interest in the subjects from his father, but partly because he can’t come to terms with losing that father (an airforce pilot), who mysteriously vanished, and he really can’t come to terms with his mother’s religious views or the fact that she has managed to move on and started dating again. With home life full of tensions, and the future unclear, it is perhaps not a surprise that he’s trying to distract himself, but also, perhaps, because he is searching for some meaning to Life, The Universe and Everything.

Into this small group comes Gabrielle Haugh’s Kelly, recently moved to the area, who Dallas is immediately smitten with, and his uncle, Myers (Starship Troopers’ Caspar Van Dien). The latter worked with his father, and under the guise of visiting the family to check up on them, he is also looking for some material Dallas’s father may have kept from a secret project Myers and he worked together on. Naturally, this spurs Dallas to look for it, and their discovery propels them into a series of investigations, following coordinates revealed by his father’s records, while the military covertly follows them.

I won’t go any further into what happens for fear of spoilers. The story is a little overdone, perhaps, and maybe labours some of its points a bit too clumsily, but that said, I still found it to be a lot of fun, a good Saturday night popcorn flick. It feels inspired by a lot of earlier works, notably the Goonies, and in some ways, it felt a bit to me like a nineties or early two thousands take on Goonies who were now in their twenties, and for those of us who grew up on those eighties flicks, that’s no bad thing! So yes, there are some problems, but overall this is just a fun, popcorn movie to sit back and enjoy.

Monsters of California is available on digital platforms from 7th of July.