Monsters in the Closet – Film Review

When famous horror author Raymond Castle (Tom Cikoski) dies under mysterious circumstances, his daughter Jasmin (Jasmin Flores) returns home to investigate his death. Jasmin discovers her father was using evil black magic to write his newest horror masterpiece. When the author’s audiobook is played out loud monsters, zombies and terrifying beings spring from the undead pages to haunt the living. Never open a Pandora box that can’t be closed.

As a film critic, I always want every movie that I see to be good. Of course, that’s not always going to happen because bad films are inevitably going to appear on my radar, but nevertheless, I still hope for the best at all times. 2022 is definitely going to be a wonderful year for movies just like any other year, but sadly, the first film I’ve seen this year – Monsters in the Closet – is an absolute trainwreck. It’s so bad to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if this was still in the bottom of my yearly ranking list.

Almost every single scene here is incompetently shot and incredibly poorly told in terms of a story standpoint. The film is barely even about what its synopsis suggests – most of the time it comes across as a dark comedy about a bunch of zombies that are out for blood and it’s not like that story’s been done a million times before or anything. I had an awful feeling about the film’s quality as soon as I saw a scene in the first ten minutes featuring somebody going inside a store, eating a ton of food, and vomiting it all up. It’s a scene that’s strangely played for laughs but instead, it’s just cringe-inducing and disgusting to have to watch.

In terms of character development? I mean, what character development? Throughout the course of the film, we learn next to nothing about any of the characters including the lead protagonist Jasmin. Jasmin Flores does the best job she can at portraying this character, but I’d imagine it must be difficult to portray a character that has been given no depth whatsoever in the script. To be honest, it almost comes across as if this movie didn’t even have a script and The Snygg Brothers just came up with scene ideas on set. Obviously, that’s a big no-no.

A horror movie should, at the very least, be a little bit unsettling. There should be a couple of scenes that manage to make you feel somewhat uneasy. You should feel tensed up inside, waiting to see what’s going to happen next. With Monsters in the Closet, however, the only thing I was constantly waiting on was for the end credits to roll so I didn’t have to suffer any longer. It’s only eighty-nine minutes long including credits, but that doesn’t make this disastrously boring and incompetently told story any more tolerable.