Jan-Gel 3: Hillbilly Monster

Hillbilly Monster has all the qualities you would expect from a film made as a grade school class project. The problem is, kids didn't make it. It's just a very low budget movie made with remarkably bland taste. The movie isn't scary and it isn't funny. It just kind of grinds along. I think there was an attempt to make this one of the movies that you say "it's so bad, it's good" and it does play on the Ed Wood connection of Conrad Brooks. Conrad Brooks is the director and plays a key character in Hillbilly Monster. He's had roles in quite a few "it's so bad, it's good" movies, including a few Ed Wood films. This one just doesn't make it. The title is the main attraction and holds the hope of horror and probably comedy but there's nothing to this film. It's boring and forgettable. Don't waste your time on a catchy title.

The spawn of Jan-Gel has arrived in whats the third film of the series. Thats slightly better than whats gone before, but still is pretty crappy.

The plot has the supposed offspring of Jan-Gel breaking out of a carnival and heading off into the woods of Virginia. This is the third film in a series and its easily the best and a vast improvement of the first two films (Jan-Gel Beast From The East and The Beast Returns). Here you have a sense that had the film been paced better you'd have an okay grade Z flick (I discovered this by going backward and forward through the film at high speed because I thought I had missed something in the plot, I hadn't, but I did discover this actually plays better faster)

Brooks is a limited film maker of the point and shoot variety. He uses lots of sequences that have people walking or sitting or doing something to use up tape until a reasonable amount of time has passed so he can insert the next plot point. His films are extremely cheap and you can't really blame him for doing what he can with limited resources. However you can fault him for not learning to pace things better, he's made enough films to know better. Frankly, if he's going to continue to inflict his home movies on the world he should at least make something that people can actually sit through with out nodding off.

Despite being better than the first two films I can't recommend this to anyone other than those who've seen the first two Jan-Gel films and want to see Brook's improvement, however slight, as a film maker. I say this because the person I watched this with, and who didn't see the first two films, wanted to commit me for saying this was better a film than any any other, no matter how bad. (I think the statement was "Better? Are you crazy? How could anything be worse than this...")