Michael Alig!  He was the flamboyant, self-declared “King of the Club Kids.”  He was a club promoter in New York City in the late 80s and the 90s.  He had money.  He had fame.  He had a huge following.  He used to appear regularly on the daytime talk shows.  He was a regular feature in the gossip columns.  He also had a raging drug addiction and an ego that most people couldn’t stand.  He tried to position himself as the successor to Andy Warhol, overlooking the fact that Warhol himself actually had a bit of talent.  And, in 1996, he became a murderer.

He and his roommate killed his drug dealer, a fellow club kid who was known as Angel.  They hit him over the head and suffocated him before then dismembering him.  Everyone knew that Alig was responsible for Angel’s disappearance, largely because he wouldn’t shut up about killing him.  Alig even threw a party where the macabre and bloody decorations left little doubt that Alig had murder on his mind.  Eventually, a group of children found Angel’s remains and Alig and his roommate were arrested.  Due to a plea deal, Alig was sent to prison for manslaughter.  He served 14 years before being paroled.  Alig died of a heroin overdose in 2020.

Released in 2003 (while Alig was still in prison), Party Monster is a biopic of Michael Alig and also a look at New York club culture in the 90s.  The film got a bit of attention when it came out because it starred Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green as, respectively, Michael Alig and James St. John, who was Alig’s mentor-turned-friend-turned-enemy.  Unfortunately, the film itself isn’t very good and both Culkin and Green are lousy in their roles.  Both of them come across like middle American high school kids trying to score cheap laughs by acting as self-consciously flamboyant as possible.  At the time the film was made, Culkin did bear a passing a resemblance to Michael Alig but the same could have been said of Michael Pitt and, at the very least, we know that Pitt is capable of playing a character who is capable of murder.  Culkin, on the other hand, seems to be trying so hard to make us forget that he’s Macaulay Culkin that he instead continually reminds us that we’re watching the star of Home Alone snort cocaine and urinate in wine glasses.  (Ewwwww!)  That said, Culkin and Green aren’t the only two giving bad performances here.  I started giggling as soon as Dylan McDermott showed up wearing an eyepatch.  Only Wilson Cruz as Angel and Chloe Sevigny as one of Alig’s associates feel in any way convincing in their roles.

For a film about a group of people who claimed “fabulousness” as their defining aesthetic, Party Monster is a visually dull film.  Many scenes are overlit, to the extent that the performers look wan and washed out.  That may be a good look for the drug-addled Alig who killed Angel but, in this film, Alig looks and seems burned out from the minute he shows up in New York City.  The end result is a rather boring film that doesn’t offer up any insight into the Club Kids or the murders.