Hey everybody… Jonathan Moody back here again. This time to talk about the 1998 flick, “Boltneck” AKA Teen Monster or Big Monster on Campus. Whatever you might know it as. I’ve been dying to do this flick for so long because I absolutely loved it when I first saw it. It’s not a very stinky movie as you will hear later but I knew Paul would not want to sit through it because its about teenagers – and we should all know by now how he truly feels about movies with teenagers as the protagonists. So I asked two of my beautiful special guests to come on… Liz Fletcher and MeeChee Hazen. Both of them have never met before so it was a fun discussion! I wasn’t entirely sure what they would think of it. But check out the latest IFC episode to hear their full thoughts.
Here is what IMDB says:
At a party, one student gets picked on and ends up getting thrown into a pool that has no water in it. Frank, a geek, retrieves a brain from his father’s lab and agrees to let the boy have it in exchange for a chance to hang with the popular crowd. The brain, it turns out, originally belonged to a serial killer. As the teen monster goes haywire, popular Macy becomes romantically involved with former geek Frank– Anonymous
The cast is one of my favorites: Frank Stein is played by Matthew Lawrence (yes, one of the Lawrence brothers… most notably in my favorite series Boy Meets World). I am sure his middle name was something with an N, Frank N Stein. Ryan Reynolds plays Karl O’Reilly who is very convincing as a shy goth kid who after being killed his brain is swapped with a serial killer who is so happy to get a second chance at life. Christine Lakin plays Macy who is Frank’s crush. Justin Walker and Christian Payne are the two bullies who killed Karl. Shelley Duvall and Judge Reinhold are a lot of fun as Frank’s parents. Charles Fleisher (who if that name sounds familiar its because he does the voice of Roger Rabbit) plays an awkward teacher. And one of my favorite actors Richard Moll (From TV’s Night Court) is Karl’s drunken and abusive dad.
This is very much a Teen Young Frankenstein… maybe you can call it An Even Younger Frankenstein. Ryan Reynolds is his typical Ryan Reynolds self but this was before he got super famous for being in Van Wilder. All the cast did an exceptional job. For a movie that was for the most part lacking in budget it seemed to make up for in a fun comedic script. The writer was Dave Payne who wrote films before like “Concealed Weapon”, “Alien Terminator”, and Criminal Hearts”. I think this was a very well crafted screenplay. Though I do wanna look up Alien Terminator and maybe do that someday for Indie Film Cafe.
The direction of this movie felt very normal. Not any kind of style but the director had a lot of fantastic people to work with so he was able to do a great job. Mitch Marcus is credited as the director and Sharkzilla director John Blush is uncredited, but I have no idea the full story on that. Whether the director was fired or replaced or just the other director was called in to help out. Sadly there’s no story about it on the IMDB trivia and to my knowledge there are no DVDs or Blu Rays with commentary as a special feature. Though that would be an interesting thing to find out and research. If anyone knows any information about that please contact us at indiefilmcafe@gmail.com .Overall though this movie was just a lot of fun. It has cracked me up and my other guests seemed to enjoy it as well… so on to the scores:
The Scores are in… And as I said I really loved it and of course gave it the lowest score of 2. MeeChee Hazen loved it close enough and gave it a 2.5. But Liz was a bit harsher on it and gave it a 4.. For a stink score of 8.5. Not too shabby. Interestingly enough this is the first in the ladder of stink to get an 8.5. I am sure it will not be the only one though. But hey something has to start it all.
And there ya have it thank you guys so much for checking this out and the Moo Cow is going to tell you all how you can get your hooves on a copy of this flick… Take it away, Paul….
Moo! So HERE is the trailer, udder the name Teen Monster. Ughhh, teenagers…. :=8P
You can watch this zit-faced nonsense for free on YOUTUBE, or be prepared to pony up some dough to git yer hooves on the DVD from AMAZON or via re-sale on Ebay. Cinematerial.com has the digital poster of the film, and dat’s pretty mooch it for schwag since this moovie is pretty mooch an non-entity. Horror Society did a review of the film back in the day, and Looper did a ranking of all 44 of Ryan Reynolds’ moovies, worst to best, and this one got pegged as worst, so there’s that.
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