Party Monster (2003)

Party Monster is special because it treats the neon-glossed New York club scene like both a fairy tale and a cautionary mural—seductive, hilarious, and finally chilling, all in the same breath. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato capture a candy-colored vibe that feels sweaty and alive, where outrageous costumes and one-liners aren’t just decoration but armor against emptiness. Macaulay Culkin’s performance is the hook: fearless, abrasive, and oddly vulnerable, he makes Michael Alig’s rise feel intoxicating even as the floor starts to tilt, while Seth Green gives the story a sharp, amused conscience. It’s not for viewers looking for a tidy morality play or a sanitized nightlife nostalgia trip, but if you want a watchable, high-energy descent that finds real pathos beneath the glitter, this one sticks.

Party Monster is clearly trying to bottle the neon, anything-goes chaos of the ’80s/’90s Club Kids scene and turn a real-life rise-and-crash into a lurid cautionary tale. The problem is it often confuses outrageous costumes and druggy spectacle for actual storytelling, so the movie can feel repetitive, emotionally thin, and oddly predictable despite the shocking material. Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green commit hard to the camp, and the production design captures the era’s greasy glitter, but if you’re hoping for a deep character study or a tense true-crime thriller, this may leave you feeling like you stayed too long at a party that stopped being fun an hour ago. If you like stylized, trashy, club-kid melodrama and can tolerate a lot of decadence without much insight, you’ll get more out of it than most.