Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

Monster, the Movie

by Bruce Anderson

"BRUCE," the caller began, "I know you said you gave up movies a long time ago because they're all so bad, but I guarantee you you'll like Monster. It's really good."

Buddy boy, you owe me $5.50 for the matinee ticket I bought last Friday afternoon. Monster is very bad art getting rave reviews because it's dishonest art, false art, pseudo-art, didactic art, sentimental art, dumb art.

An actress named Charlize Theron plays the real life Eileen Wournos, an amok prostitute who eventually did the professionally logical thing and began knocking off her customers. When the Florida cops found the tenth guy with his pants around his ankles and numerous bullet holes in his chest, they figured out that a commercial woman was the likely perp. Two years later they arrested Eileen Wournos, a visibly deranged sad sack who probably offed twice as many syphllis-intent Florida males than she was charged with permanently detumesi-cizing. Miss Theron is a good actress. She does an excellent nut. But who needs movie nuts when we can look out any window in the country and see the real thing?

Anyway, what we've got here is a liberal parody — squared — because all the libs are raving about it and because it's totally false but with big pretensions. The real-life Wournos was driven mad by her sordid life experience, a life that began with her sexual abuse as a child, segued on into drug use and sale of her teen self to random men, multiple substance abuse and more post teen, down-market men, and finally into flagging down the most downscale men of all, interstate impulse lotharios. So far, not much in the way of movie material here, but introduce a same sex love interest, a family of cartoon bigots, a series of pathetic white male vics, an evil cop, an arrogant lawyer (Gee, I wonder how they came up with one of those?), big fat biker boys, and we've got a lib lab fantasy checklist going right up there on the big screen!

The story line: Killer Girl falls in love with Moon Maiden. It's the first real love of Killer Girl's life, a life whose men have driven her murderously 5150. But Moon Maiden really loves Killer Girl. You can tell she does because Moon Maiden stares at Killer Girl all the time with her great big brown peepers. Killer Girl promises Moon Maiden an ocean view home on the Florida Keys, and sets out to get the down payment by waving down late night male motorists, then killing them. That's it, folks.

You want to pay ten or twelve bucks to watch, go ahead, suckers. The libs are already standing in line across America to see it. Why, my own daughter had the impertinence to say to me, "Hope the lesbian sex scenes aren't too much for you, Pop." Oh, is that what the crocodile-mouthed kissing and epileptic dry-humping was? That was a lesbian sex scene? I thought it was cannibalism. Couldn't quite figure out for a minute how the heck cannibalism fit the story line, but then this thing wasn't Love Story either.

When Killer Girl starts shooting her "johns," she starts with the most vile of them all who, and this was one of many lib-lab give aways in a movie full of the worst kind of PC stereotyping, happened to be a blue collar rapist. NPR listeners don't rape women. Small animals at an after hours petting zoo maybe, but not women. The class bias of the filmmaker is clear in the movie's victim list. Beginning with the worst man of all, the working guy in an old bomber mobile, Killer Girl's subsequent vics look like the board of directors of the Savings Bank of Mendocino. Or your average male school superintendent. They're all pathetic white guys. Overdrawn pathetic white guys. The most pathetic of all is a fat guy Killer Girl feels sorry for because he says, "I've never done this before." (In real life Killer Girl mowed them all down regardless of pathos content.)

Killer Girl's girl friend, Moon Maiden, is portrayed as a virginal, closeted Northerner who'd headed South to live with an aunt and uncle while she looked for work and a love life consistent with her psycho-biological yearnings. (If she wasn't retarded she would have headed for San Francisco or Vermont, not rural Florida.)

Moon Girl's father is, Guess What? A fundamentalist preacher! What else? Dad couldn't just be any old Dad because he's now in a movie aimed specifically at the NPR-Pacifica lib-lab demographic. Nope, Dad's got to be a Homophobic, Patriarchical, Mysoginistic, Racist, Archetypal White Man Nutball and, as every lib-lab knows because Amy Goodman and Alice Walker tells them it's so, there's no such creature as a humane fundy of the white male type. Moon Maiden's dad is a caricature, in other words. All the men in Monster are caricatures. With which the movie is replete, male and female. Fortunately, we're spared the sight of dear old dad but we do hear him bellowing a telephoned promise of eternal damnation at his cringing daughter who is so afraid of him she holds the phone at arm's length.

Moon Maiden, the aspiring lesbian, seeks sanctuary with Aunt and Uncle in Florida. They're backwards by definitions, which is defined by the film as their race, their religion and their state of residence. But there's a gay bar just down the street. Aunt and Uncle are slightly worse than the kid's God-crazed father in that Unc, also an all-purpose nutball, why Unc's an armed Christer. Aunt, played by a contextually and implausibly attractive actress, catches Killer Girl and Moon Child in bed together. Aunt's shocked! Shocked that such a thing could happen under her God fearing roof! Unc naturally comes barging through Moon Child's door waving a hand-cannon of a .345 at the mere sound of something amiss. He was too late. Killer Girl, just back from a fresh murder and looking for love, had already taken off. If the girls had been nekkid and lip-locked, golly boy wowee Unc could have been counted on to unleash some serious mayhem because that's what white males of a certain class do, right lib-labs?

We're in Parody Land. And this thing is supposed to be a serious movie? Nobody in Moon Child's family could have been portrayed as being very, very, very, very concerned that Moon Child has involved herself with a violently psychotic criminal because they love her? No. There's a lesson to be taught by Monster, and the lesson is That Certain Groups of White People Are Very, Very Bad. Moon Child's choice of Killer Girl is only one of her family's many concerns: Dad, Aunt and Uncle are even more concerned that (1) Moon Child (who's consistently portrayed as damn near retarded, which she would have to be to have fallen for such an obvious nutball as Killer Girl) seems to be attracted to persons of the same sex (2) she's not only stopped going to church, she's apparently repudiated all the helpful life lessons she's presumably learned there — homophobia and helping the menfolk pack their ammo, among other things (3) she's acting like a "nigger."

As if all this isn't way, way over the top even by the Major Mawk Standards of Really Bad Lib Lab Art, we get Bruce Dern as a wise old hippie! I damn near walked when Wise Old Hippie loomed up on screen, which would have left exactly one other male in the theater, a lonely guy-looking 40-something who'd sat down with three huge containers of popcorn as if he were expecting two more people to join him. Or maybe he was just nuts. It was Popcorn Man, me and maybe 500 Social Security old ladies who I wish had been spared this unusually grueling, filmic ordeal. Getting back to Wise Old Hippies: the Northcoast of California, aka Ecotopia, aka The Emerald Triangle, aka The Hippie Smithsonian, happens to be world headquarters for Old Hippies. I happen to live at ground zero of Old Hippie Land, and I'm here to tell you there's no such thing as a Wise Old Hippie. True, I don't know all the Old Hippies. Yes, it's a mathmatic possibility there's a Wise One out there in the hills somewhere. But if there is, he or she is keeping his or her wisdom to itself because I've never met a Wise Old Hippie or even heard of one.

One more beef, and I could go on, believe me: The Wise Old Hippie in this awful movie walks on the wild side, and if you're a filmmaker with a liberal hate message, where do you find the wild side? Ta-da! The Biker Bar. What's a Biker Bar? A Biker Bar, according to Monster, is a grungy, dimly lit dump of a drinking place where a lot of very large, hairy, tatooed guys peacefully drink beer.

A truly dangerous place is the juice bar at the health club where NPR execs drink, and a truly dangerous reverse bigot movie is this one.