Monsters of California, the writing and directorial debut of Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge, starts out strong, cliche-wise. After an ‘I bet you're wondering how I got here' introduction, we follow trio Dallas (Jack Samson), Toe (Jack Lancaster) and Riley (Jared Scott) as they try to gather evidence of a ghostly presence in a local house. Within the first 15 minutes there's a healthy dose of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo dialogue, clunky exposition and the entrance of a shady figure who's so obviously suspicious that it's difficult to understand why no one twigs that he might be up to something earlier.
Context is delivered heavy-handedly. Dallas's father had a mysterious government job, was intensely interested in the paranormal, and disappeared. Mourning the death of his father, unable to move on and furious that anyone else in his family even might, Dallas is determined to find out what really happened. When he and his friends find a GPS and folder handily marked ‘CLASSIFIED', it seems they're one step closer to understanding. In the file, hidden in a racy magazine in their garage (an excellent hiding place for a serious operative, and somehow something his military partner never noticed), are documents and photos evidencing UFOs and aliens.
In classic conspiracy style, paranormal investigations are linked to aliens, despite there being little to link the two. In the film's opening scenes, the central trio interact with an actual ghost. Then they start looking into UFOs. Then they meet Bigfoot. Then, for some reason, Richard Kind is there – not a supernatural figure, but just as much of a surprising presence.
With the characters taking everything in stride, there's no sense of danger or excitement. A few screams and shrieks aside, as soon as the danger disappears, the trio return to their baseline selves. They also accept everything at face value, without any demand for evidence – strange given the don't-be-sheeple attitude of conspiracy theorists. And those with the information seem happy to give it up without much of a fight. For a deeply protected government secret, officials are pretty loose-lipped about it all.
Humour is scarce, and attempts are largely just scatalogical with a few sex ‘jokes' that fall hugely flat. The male characters' treatment of women is deeply outdated, with the comments and actions from Riley and Toe to Dallas's mother and sister (Camille Kostek) uncomfortable to watch, making the pair difficult to root for. When Dallas meets a girl in a coffee shop later on, Kelly (Gabrielle Haugh) seems largely relaxed with the low-level harassment and uncomfortable comments that are made to and around her, so much so that she goes on a camping trip with them after meeting Dallas once. An adolescent boy's ideal of a teenage girl, she has even less substance than the central trio.
Alongside the spooky-kooky antics is a standard family drama. Dallas's dismissal of his family's Christian beliefs is obviously meant to be what we root for, but his outbursts just sound like a 15-year-old boy's attempts to be edgy in RE class. We are also shown he is edgy because he has a bad tattoo on his neck, and his hair expands in every scene. Despite attempts to make him interesting and complex, he is above all else a boring character.
This is obviously a way for Tom DeLonge to share his ideas, built up over years of research into aliens. The conspiracy angles could be interesting, and this could have been a taut thriller, but it's not. By the end of the film we know nothing more than we did at the start; the government is hiding something from us, and religion comes from or proves the existence of aliens. The story is thin, with occasional bursts of dense exposition that serve to get Delonge's ideas across awkwardly forced in, and the characters are unlikeable. Poorly thought out and clumsily executed, the real conspiracy here is how Richard Kind got involved.
Monsters of California is available in the UK from 7 July.
Podcast
