By: Stanley Wicker

This is both a movie and book review. The book, published in 1999 and originally titled Disco Bloodbath: A Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland, was written by James St. James, a celebutante during the 1980s and 1990s who also was a part of the post-Warholian club kids scene that pervaded American club culture in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The movie was made in 2003, renamed Party Monsters, and stars Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Chloe Sevigny, and Wilmer Valderrama.

The film is entertaining for the simple reason that it features Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green as drugged-up drag queens with semi-feminine voices parading around in some of the most flamboyant wardrobe you’ve probably ever seen, of course unless you actually experienced the club kid culture. While not a spectacular performance from either actor, it does capture a good bit of what James St. James portrayed in his original true story.

The book reads like fiction, but it’s not. It reads like an acid trip, combining some of the worst features of Ken Kesey, William Burroughs, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. That’s not to say that it’s written horribly. It reads just fine, perhaps mediocre and clichéd at some points. But it is a hedonistic road trip through the spectacular world of ecstasy-driven club culture during the nineties that inevitably led to the murder of a drug dealer and the arrest and conviction of one of the best known club kids who was considered to be the scene’s founder in many respects, Michael Alig. This is perhaps the book and film’s best selling point: it’s a true story, but you’d never guess it.

In a way it’s an entirely new story, but in more respects it is similar to every story ever written, with love, betrayal, and loneliness motivating every character into the direction of their destruction and then reconstruction, or possible death. With character names like Freezer, Christina Superstar (who is played by Marilyn Manson in the film), Keoki, and Angel, among many other wacky names, it’s not particularly surprising to find out that most of the characters either ended up dead, in jail, or rehabilitating while trying to pick the pieces of their fragmented lives off the floors of Manhattan clubs.

If you enjoy spectacle with intermittent maxims sprinkled in here and there, then Party Monsters would be a great story to read and watch. If you need something to read really quickly on vacation, then it would also suit your needs. But don’t expect the greatest story ever written, because not even James St. James, its author, pretends for it to be. Rather, expect a wild, but accurate, trip into the past that will remind you why exactly the club-kid-scene, and other scenes similar to it that came after at the turn of the century, never last.