Love and Monsters is a new PVOD (premium video-on-demand… aka… $20 rental/$25 purchase at time of release) movie that I kind of rented blind. I caught it on Amazon Prime but it’s available elsewhere as well. I gave it a shot based on some rumblings I heard… that it was going to be a theatrical release and that it showed promise. But I hadn’t seen a trailer and, frankly, I didn’t have high expectations.
Which makes me happy to say that I was pleasantly surprised by a genuinely charming, surprisingly sweet, and fun action/adventure/sci-fi/horror comedy. Love and Monsters is about an Earth overrun by mutated bugs, amphibians, and crustaceans. It seems, in order to save the planet for a rogue asteroid, the countries of the world launched ALL the missiles into space… and then razzle-dazzle-root-beer, creatures mutated into lumbering monsters and thus we now have the monster apocalypse. The few remaining survivors, finding themselves at the bottom of the food chain, hide out in underground bunkers.
Our hero, played by Dylan O’Brien, is one of those survivors and is an inexperienced coward… which he doesn’t want to be. When he finds out his girlfriend from before the world ended is alive, he decides to go above ground and travel the 85 miles to be with her again. And he runs into monsters, other survivors, and a dog. The best dog.
The dog’s name is Boy and is one of the encounters he has on the way. The dog is a great canine actor and almost makes the movie. Michael Rooker appears, playing a very similar – but far nicer – character than he usually plays. He travels with a little girl/bad-ass monster hunter with a pink bow played by an actress named Ariana Greenblatt. She’s charismatic as hell. His girlfriend is played by Jessica Henwick, last most noticeably seen as one of the better parts of the Iron Fist and Defenders tv shows. So a great cast, especially that dog.
The critters they face, at first, didn’t make a good impression on me. I was worried the budget wouldn’t allow for good creature effects. But either I was in a crabby mood or the FX simply got better because the monster design and rendering is actually very good. Suitably slimy and mutated-y to present a real threat.
And that leads to some surprisingly good – and, more to the point, fun little action set pieces. I was surprised by how invested I was in this goofy little movie that I cared when the hero’s life was on the line. On top of that, the flick has some surprisingly genuine touching, charming, and beautiful scenes (though I call shenanigans playing one of the scenes to Stand By Me because that songs makes pretty much anything better). The fact this creature feature had the courage to pause to have moving moment of beauty really surprised me.
So, yeah, I’d recommend this at that $20 rental fee… or maybe wait for a few months and catch it at a regular rental price. It’s a lot better than I expected though it certainly took a few minutes to grow on me. But, by the end, I was really surprised that this little flick pulled something off. One of the first original movies of this dreadful year to just charm me, surprise me, and make me smile. Maybe not for every taste, but for the sci-fi/horror/action/adventure/comedy nerd in me, it worked.
Score: 86