These days, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato are kings of reality TV, producing such shows as "Sex Change Hospital" and "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal." But they started out as documentary filmmakers, getting their first major attention with a doc and then a feature film about New York's king of the "Club Kids," Michael Alig, who's now doing 10-to-20 for killing a fellow partyer. The feature-film version of Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, is better known, but here at Doc-a-Day, we believe fact is more interesting than fiction, so we looked at Party Monster: The Shockumentary, released in 1998.
The story is a familiar one: gay kid comes to New York from the midwest, drops out of college, gets involved in the downtown party scene, the drugs flow, bad shit happens, and it all ends in tears. Lou Reed built a career on songs about this type of thing, and you can save some time by getting a copy of Transformer and forgetting about this derivative 80s scene.
But I guess if you came along in the 80s, as Bailey and Barbato did, you missed the whole Warhol Factory thing, and this was all you had. And what thin gruel it is. Party Monster feels long at 57 minutes not just because the Club Kids are unidimensional, but because it tells a story that everybody already knows. The film provides no perspective or insight, and lets barely coherent drug addicts - including Alig himself - prattle on and on. There is no art in this film, no metaphor, no psychological insight; just a predictable tabloid story without a single surprise. We've seen it all before on Geraldo, where the Club Kids were apparently frequent guests. Party Monster treads the same ground, scratching no deeper than insights such as "they wanted to make fun of consumer culture and be part of it at the same time." There is a story to be told here, but Bailey and Barbato weren't interested in exploring it. They were just practicing for their brilliant career as reality kings.
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