Cutie Diego Boneta was pretty high profile for a hot minute, starring in Rock Of Ages and the first season of Scream Queens. He also appeared in the kick ass horror flick Summer Camp, one of my faves in recent years. So when I watched Monster Party and discovered he was in it, I checked to see what other horror he may have been in that I’d missed, which left me with just City of Dead Men. So how were these two?
MONSTER PARTY (2018)
This is a darkly odd and gory party for horror fans with a great cast. The family throwing the party includes main witch Sarah from The Craft, Cole from Charmed, main hero girl Starlight from The Boys, and YouTube star turned actor Kian Lawley (The Chosen).
Two guys and a girl work as servers at a dinner party for the rich family, where they plan to rob the place during the festivities. Little do they know the gathering of snooty wealthy people is sort of like an AA party…for serial killers.
As the celebration gets underway, there’s some good tension created, with the slow burn promising something crazy will happen. It does with full force, and it’s quite unexpected. Blood and body parts fly as the thieves attempt to escape while avoiding all the white collar killers after the house goes into lockdown.
It is loads of fun as the egotistical serial killers don’t only go after the threesome, but begin to turn on each other. Chaos ensues, massacres abound, and there’s even a gruesome surprise waiting in the bowels of the house.
So how does Diego Boneta play into all this? He is a guest, and while it’s fun to see him as one of the bad guys for a change, his role is minor.
CITY OF DEAD MEN (2014)
Well, Diego is the star of this film, but it’s unbearable to watch despite several promising plot points and cool horror color tones.
He plays an American traveling through South America. Having run out of money, he accepts an invitation to meet a group of guys living in an abandoned asylum.
Like some sort of bad boy cult, they have raves, take hallucinogens to connect with the spirit world and face their personal demons, and delve into extreme challenges to explore their mortality—like skateboarding down winding roads wearing masks and playing chicken with motorcycles.
Meanwhile, the asylum has a tragic history in which there was a mass suicide of children, and Diego has guilt involving the death of his brother. After his first initiation with his new buddies, he is soon imagining horrific things (like a snake slithering from his mouth), and encountering a little boy with a creepy mask…who he is convinced is his brother.
Oh how good it all sounds. Instead, it is agonizingly boring and disjointed, offering little in the way of horror scares or shocks. It mostly just feels like a movie about a bunch of homeless kids throwing raves in an abandoned building, doing drugs, and occasionally taking group dares.
