Beautiful Creatures: Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer

Some people keep their skeletons in the closet. Others bury them in the backyard near their pipes with the demon possessed black hearts still beating inside. Get ready to take a trip down the drain with this strange, sometimes gross, horror comedy.

Jack Brooks isn’t the best plumber in town. Between childhood trauma, an annoyingly controlling girlfriend, an exasperated therapist, and some crippling anger management issues, he barely gets through most days. All Jack wants is an outlet, a way to let out all his rage and help him relax in a healthy, constructive way. While helping his science professor, Professor Crowley (played by horror legend Robert Englund) with some bad pipes in the old home the man is slowly restoring, Jack unblocks a pipe that allows a strange, supernatural mist to eventually seep in through the corroded copper. It seems the previous owners had buried an ancient evil a little too close to the septic line.

While Professor Crowley, possessed by the strange evil unearthed in his own home, Jack goes to the local hardware store for replacement parts for the old water pump in the basement only to be told the strange, tragic history of the house on Watson Road by the equally antiquated Howard who works in the back of the store. Taking a belt of something, presumably homemade whiskey, Howard tells Jack how he lived in the house on Watson Road with his uncle who collected and studied rare, unusual artifacts. A heart in a glass case, legend said taken from a demon defeated in ancient Japan, came into the man’s possession and soon became incarnate in Uncle Emmett’s body. The young Howard, losing his hand in the battle, managed to bury the evil until Jack accidentally woke it from its slumber.

Meanwhile, Professor Crowley continues to show up to class each night, deteriorating more and more in what everyone assumes is a drunken decline for a college professor stuck teaching night classes in the local high school. Unfortunately, everyone learns to their horror that the professor is, in fact, developing into a hideous, oozing monster intent on devouring his students. Using a disturbing looking mouth organ (trust me, you’ll understand when you see it) the Crowley demon begins to turn students into his own possessed army, sending them after Jack, his girlfriend Eve and the night janitor. With nowhere to run to Jack finally finds a practical outlet for his rage: killing monsters. Managing to get his tools from his van in the parking lot and, for the mercy of all of us getting Eve out of the picture, he goes back into the school put an end to the monsters breeding inside.

Thanks to what little he learned from Professor Crowley’s science course and the demon’s decision to eat a student or two while our hero prepared for the final showdown, Jack manages to rescue the handful of severely traumatized survivors and save the day. The last few minutes of the film are Jack going into the world, kicking monster ass, and generally giving us a happy, gory ending.

So here’s what’s great about this movie: practical effects and Robert Englund. Don’t get me wrong, the film is fun to watch and entertaining but there is no substitute in horror movies for a guy in a rubber suit, puppets, and buckets of fake blood and bile and this movie gave us all of this, at times, in an even Sam Raimi-esque fashion. I mean, you never doubt when you’re watching a guy with a face prosthesis or a Chuck E.Cheese grade puppet delivering mayhem, but you also don’t care. And people never give Robert Englund enough credit as an actor. He’s much more than just Freddy Krueger and in this movie you’ll see him go from a nerdy kind of loveable into a gross, festering monster but the way he does it brings a lot of life to the character. The acting is on a par with what you expect to find in a mid-range monster flick with decent cinematography and cuts between scenes. If you’re looking for something entertaining on a rainy night, check it out. It won’t disappoint.