31 Days of Asian Horror: Mon Mon Mon Monsters (2017)

It’s Creature Feature Friday and today we are going to Taiwan to talk about the 2017 horror comedy directed by Giddens Ko, Mon Mon Mon Monsters. The movie has been sitting in My List on Shudder for a very long time. I’d put off partly because of time, but also partly because I knew it was going to be a comedy and needed to be in the mood for it before pressing play. As I began watching I thought I had made a mistake, the first 15 minutes or so of the movie is sort of hard to get through and focuses on a trope that I tend to stay away from (bullying), but the introduction of the monsters in the first minutes of the movie made me intrigued enough to power through, and I’m glad I did.

Mon Mon Mon Monsters follows Lin Shu Wei (played by Yu Kai Teng whose most recent credit is Tree in the River), a high school student who is constantly tormented by a group of students in his class. When the teacher assigns the group and him to do some community work they encounter a monster, capturing and torturing it. They uncover secrets about its power and use that to continue their terror. The film has sort of an easy and somewhat overused plotline, with the moral of the piece being a fairly used plot: the exploration of how humans can be much more monsters than actual monsters. Ko has stated in interviews that at the time of working on the project he was having a hard time as he was caught up in a public affair scandal. Using the hatred he was receiving from the public about it led to the creation of the text.

“But when I started to work on the script, I found I couldn’t exclude myself from the horror, so the project developed into a more personal story.” (source)

The pacing is executed well and hones in on the narrative, getting darker as the movie progresses and felt the movie had some genuinely good scares and the creepiness level of the monsters worked well. Without giving too much away, the monsters are closer to vampires but the narrative never confirms this, and the way that they interact with each other and humans is just different enough to make it an interesting take on a smashup of different creatures. Eugenie Liu (Triad Princess) plays the eldest of the monster sisters. I’m familiar with some of her other work and was impressed by her interpretation of the monster. For most of the movie I didn’t even recognize her - not just because of the makeup. The pacing of the comedy also worked well for me, and while there is a bit more of the over exaggerated puns and gimmicks, it fits the characters. Despite their horrific acts, the main characters are underdeveloped kids and I think the story did a good job to remind the audience of that every once in a while. They are immature and I think a lot of the comedy is just a mirror of the kid’s immaturity not understanding the severity of the situation, and how they are breaking the tension of the situation rather than the movie trying to interject it. The comedy dissipates when it needs to, and it was never a jarring tonal watch for me.

I really enjoyed the movie much more than I expected to. Once I got past the bullying in the first part, which I mentioned is a trigger for me, I was able to start to relax and focus on the story. While a lot of what happens is not unexpected the story is intriguing and some of the characters had great layers to them that were able to be executed as the story unfolded. There are some genuinely great scenes. The bus scene, for example, was a highlight and perfectly accomplished a mix of horror, gore, and worked as a great way to convey the raw emotion of the monster and it didn’t just add a showy spectacle. The ending also stuck the landing, making it an all-around great watch.

Mon Mon Mon Monsters is currently streaming on Shudder.

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