The Hall Monitor

The Hall Monitor

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Movie Reviews of The Hall Monitor

Movie Review: Guns, Fist Fights, T&A, in a High School Power Struggle
Summary: 5 Stars

Awesome.

I had the chance to speak with the Filmmakers and the star at the Atlantic City Film Festival. They made a great impression and won a couple of awards there a few years ago.

Set in Rocky Mountain High School, The Hall Monitor Tells the story of killer in spiked hair and spiked leather jewelry lurking the halls, systematically killing members of the School Football Team, the Ragin' Rocky Mountain Carrots. The only force within the school powerful enough to stop this killer is the High School "Hall Monitor" and his 357 Magnum... the same "most powerful handgun in the world" used by "Dirty" Harry Callahan.

If this description makes you think of The Columbine Tragedy, it might be of interest to note that this film was actually written and shot a full year before the Columbine Tragedy 4 years ago.

On The Surface, The Hall Monitor is a low budget black comedy set in high school. In reality, it's a low budget black comedy set in high school... with a slyly subversive sense of satire and social criticism.

Presumably shelved for four years due to the Contraversy over The Columbine Tragedy, The Hall Monitor pokes fun high school violence in a way that forces us to question the ultimate causes of teenage violence in today's society.

Ultimately though, Adolescent Violence is not what the Hall Monitor is intended to be about. This film is legitimately using High School as a microcosmic metaphor for the larger world of western culture on the whole. The Hall Monitor shows us a world in which teenage girls are treated like sex objects by the culture at large and unpopular kids kill popular kids out of vengeance and the most popular kid in school is ultimately the one who carries the biggest gun and kicks the most butt.

But don't worry, there's plenty of sexual humor, nudity, pre-matrix era fight scenes and general silliness to keep you amused... if you don't care about any of that stuff.

In one sense their world is seen by the filmmakers as sheer absurdity. It is obvious that their vision of this world is one of farce. A funny thing has happened in the years since the film was shot... Reality caught up with the Farce. Adolescent Teenage Culture is really not so far off from the film's absurdist sense of that world.

What occurs when the film is viewed with this in mind is striking. Far from feeling out of date, the film takes on a far more biting and in some ways true feeling sense of Swiftian Satire.

While The Hall Monitor may have been intended as an Absurdist look into Popular Culture set in a "Typical American High School," what it has become is a Sharp and Painfully Ironic Satire on the Absurd Nature of what is now Typical American Teenage High School Life.

While this makes for a far less sensitive film, it may in fact make for a more relevant one.

Seeing the film and meeting the folks behind it piqued my interest and since then, I've learned much about the film from its website...

If you have any bit of an off beat sense of humor or if you've ever survived either High School or the Movie business, this sucker is not to be missed.

Summary of The Hall Monitor