Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer

When Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer hit the genre festival circuit last year, it immediately developed a whole lot of buzz for being the kind of unbridled monster/gore/love-fest that hasn’t been seen since Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi were given big Hollywood budgets and started making movies about guys in spider costumes. Jack Brooks owes its existence to the cult classics produced in the early careers of those guys, as the gross-out make-up and over-the-top camera antics (strange angles! Dollying always! Uncomfortable lenses!) recall Bad Taste and Evil Dead with the kind of love and respect that make horror fans gush in uncontrollable hyperbole. The story centres on the titular Jack Brooks (played with early Bruce Campbell-like gusto by Trevor Matthews), a plumber with an anger problem stemming from some mild childhood trauma involving his family and a flesh-eating demon. While helping out in the creepy old house of his night school professor (horror legend Robert Englund), he accidentally unleashes some ancient evil shit that turns the gentle, bumbling professor into a massive, evil, awesome-looking monster. The rest of the movie is spent with various characters turning into monsters, only be to slayed quite effectively by Brooks. It’s stupid, fun and guaranteed to please genre fans. This DVD contains some enlightening extras as well. A "behind the scenes” featurette illustrates the lengths the filmmakers went to in achieving a high-gloss look on a low-budget film, while "Creating the Monsters” highlights the creativity that went into crafting some of the movie’s most memorable moments. Plus: audio commentary, "Creating the Music,” "World Premier: Sitges, Spain.”