★☆☆☆☆
A visiting writer probing a town’s past stirs up a convergence of monsters, each dragging their own history into the present.
Less a monster mash than a thematic car crash, Larry Fessenden’s conclusion to his monsterverse quadrilogy lurches from idea to idea without ever getting a fix on any of them. It wants to say something about identity, about who gets cast as a monster and why, and you need the sure touch and earned goodwill of a Lady Gaga to start comparing LGBTIQ+ folks to monsters. Fessenden’s version lands with all the grace of Frankenstein’s creature conducting a symphony orchestra, or the Wolfman doing needlepoint.
His indie can-do spirit has inspired half the horror community, and I say that with real affection, but here he tries to stitch together his vampire film Habit, his Frankenstein riff Depraved and his wolfman-in-therapy flick Blackout, and like any botched experiment the result is awkward, flailing and fatally out of control. The frustrating part is that the spark is still visible, and there are a couple of good turns, Alex Breaux back from Depraved as the Creature analogue Adam, Fessenden himself reviving his Habit vampire.
In fact, Habit keeps looming over the whole thing as a reminder of what this mode does in the right hands. But the compositions and cutting feel a step down even from Depraved and Blackout, which were already a regression, and the script, an author noticing there are gothic monsters about upstate and causing havoc by gossiping about it, is appallingly inept. Go and watch Habit instead of this misconceived misfire, and let the quadrilogy rest.
Trauma: Or, Monsters All played at Tubi FrightFest in London.