Monster High (R)
Badmovies.org; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; Sony Pictures; Wikipedia
streaming sites: none that I know of.

This is a movie from 1989, very definitely not to be confused with the doll and animation franchise from the 2010s. I watched it on DVD in 2015, having bought the disc several years earlier because it was really cheap and I guess vaguely because on the back of the case there was a cheerleader with kind of decent legs (though as far as I can tell upon watching it, she's not in the movie at all). You know, there are lots of movies I get on DVD that I don't watch for quite a few years, and I'm not quite sure why, because I definitely really want to watch them. This isn't one of those movies. This one I put off watching because I didn't expect it to be any good. In fact, I expected it to be terrible. But finally, one night when I needed something to watch while drinking beer, I decided to get it over with... because it definitely seemed like the kind of thing that would be improved by watching while drinking. And it was pretty awful, but I still found it more enjoyable than I expected (which isn't too hard, when you don't expect a thing to be enjoyable at all). It's obvious that everyone involved in making the movie knew it would be awful, so they seemed to have fun just making it intentionally bad, which makes it a bit easier to enjoy ironically. And yet, there were a few things in the movie that I found genuinely amusing. (Also there are occasional gratuitous shots of bare breasts, though that's something I think is best enjoyed ironically, if at all.)

Anyway, somewhere far off in space, there's a "monster in charge," whom we never really see directly. He's some self-important corporate type, who wants to know why the destruction of Earth has been postponed. So he demands a report about it, and it comes in the form of a video he watches, about events during a single day at a high school on Earth. Actually, the video starts a bit before that, with the theft of a "doomsday device" by a couple of utterly incompetent aliens named Glume and Dume. The doomsday device turns out to be a weird guy named Mr. Armageddon, who had been trapped by the monster in charge some time earlier, and was supposed to be killed. But the aliens didn't know that, they just thought the device was a weapon, which they wanted to use to take over the universe or something. Anyway, they teleport to Earth to escape the authorities, after their theft, then they unwittingly release Armageddon from his prison (which looks like a basketball). Armageddon spends the following day spreading chaos throughout a high school, while Glume and Dume just sort of bumble around the place like the halfwits they are. I must say, I don't really understand how the events that transpire actually ended up in the postponement of Earth's destruction, because two things are fairly clear to me: one, said destruction was definitely part of the monster in charge's schedule, and two, it seems impossible that he was planning on using Mr. Armageddon to carry out the destruction. I have no idea what the monster in charge's actual plan was, but there must have been some kind of plan, which we hear nothing about, and Armageddon's actions should have had no effect on it. But whatevs.

Um... so... there are various characters in the movie, both students and faculty. But the only two who seemed really significant to the plot were an average guy named Norm Median and a French exchange student named Candice Caine, on whom Norm has a crush. Things start going strange at the high school pretty early on, though it takes awhile for anyone to notice. Among other pranks, Armageddon brings a gargoyle statue to life, and turns a student into a zombie, and brings a mummy to life, and turns another student into a cyborg (who has a computer for a head). Meanwhile, for no apparent reason, Armageddon seems to be killing (and probably raping) cheerleaders whom he picks out of the yearbook. But that is utterly irrelevant. Anyway, eventually Norm and Candice and a couple other students start noticing that weird stuff is going on. And Armageddon makes Norm a "prophet of doomsday," though that doesn't really amount to anything. But Norm does eventually convince Mr. Armageddon to bet the fate of the world on a basketball game. (I have absolutely no idea why Armageddon agreed to that, but then again, I don't have any idea why he chose to spend the whole day fucking with one random high school when he was supposed to be ending the whole world. But I suppose if you have the power to end the world on a whim, you can spend the day doing whatever the hell you want.) So... Armageddon and some of the monsters he's created will play against the school's team (which just happens to be called the Demons). If the high school team wins, the apocalypse will be postponed for a thousand years. If Armageddon wins (or there is a tie), the apocalypse happens immediately. (Oddly enough, there are still plenty of cheerleaders, in spite of Armageddon's having previously killed a bunch of them.) There's not much drama, considering the movie started with the knowledge that Earth's destruction had been postponed, so we already know which team wins the game. But again I say whatevs.

So... hmmm. There's probably not much else to say. It's all just completely redonkulous, and mostly stupid. But kind of funny. And stuff.