When this fall’s scary movie season passed with a bit too much comedy and not enough blockbuster horror, I found myself counting the days until the next thrilling theatrical release. Almost a month later, like picked-over Halloween candy left to languish at the bottom of the bowl until Christmas, my hopes staled as film release after film release got bumped into 2017.
Having enjoyed only a few scary movies since October to quench my unforgiving thirst for thrills, I eagerly gulped down The Monster, a new Video-On-Demand 
that promises the kind of leave-the-nightlight-on tale I loved as a kid. However, while the film’s premise promises, its execution exhausts my already frazzled frustrations. Unfortunately, it ultimately disappoints.
In The Monster, we are first introduced to preteen daughter Lizzy—mature, tidy, timely—and her young mother Kathy—irresponsible, addicted, forgetful—as they set out on a long drive to drop Lizzy off with her father. We gather that Lizzy and Kathy have had it up to here with each other, that Lizzy has had to grow up far too quickly, and that the future of their relationship hinges on this one car ride. The film’s opening is unusually depressing for a horror movie, but I remain patient through overacted flashbacks of tense scenes between the two, and settle in for the scary parts.
As day turns to night and the skies open up, Kathy and Lizzy find themselves on a deserted, tree-lined road. Their car crashes into an animal, and as the two await a tow and an ambulance, they begin to realize that they are not alone. Something inhuman lurks in the woods, seeking its next victim, and the remainder of the film becomes a savage scramble for survival.
The M
onster builds the suspense (although a bit too slowly for my taste) and makes good use of rainy windshields and dark shadows, leaving us anxiously squinting into the darkness along with the protagonists. And while the deadly creature itself is a bit cartoonish and unoriginal, we start to realize that this is kind of the whole point: what if those snarling monsters we imagined under our beds were real all along? 
The film also tips a hat to those great urban legends and ghost stories we used to read, which always seemed to kick off with a car getting deserted on an old road. It felt nice to be enjoying a good old-fashioned campfire tale.
But despite its auspicious crescendo, The Monster flops like a kid’s homemade costume at the end of a night of trick-or-treating: a bit too much papier-mâché and not enough attention to detail.
By juxtaposing shoddily acted flashbacks of a broken home with the realtime struggles of the mother-daughter pair, the film seems to be striving to present a cinematic Bildungsroman, clunking out a few larger points about childhood monsters, the relationship between mothers and daughters, and the inevitability of growing up. But these themes only floundered and distracted from the horror, which itself fell far short of terrifying, and punctuated the larger coming-of-age story quite haphazardly.
The film lazily cruises to a cliché final fight, swerving past some very obvious yet unexplored solutions and leaving some pretty patent plot-holes behind. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s back to the calendar of upcoming releases for this terrorista.
SpecialK Verdict: Like a sandwich packed tightly with love from mom, The Monster attempts to offer a throwback to the days we used to tell scary stories at sleepovers. Unfortunately, short on ingredients like acting, plot, and scares, this film is missing its mustard.
The Monster became available On Demand on Friday November 11.
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