Have you ever heard the classic story of the parents of a small child telling them to never trust a stranger offering them free candy? As adults, it makes perfect sense, but to a child turning down free candy is illogical and doesn’t make any sense. It is a classic mistake of having an important message and explaining it to your audience in a flawed way. Abnormal Attraction has a very important, all be it an obvious, message about human/ monster relations, that it could not have been explained in a more backward or rambling way.

In a world where monsters of all shapes and sizes, from leprechauns to yetis, exist, things have not been easy. They have always been seen as lesser to humans, and more recently, objectified by them. One such group trying to overcome their sexual obsessions with monsters is the Abnormal Attraction help group, lead by Nick. After his car dies on him Nick is kidnapped by a human-hating group of monsters and is at risk of being their prisoner forever. Can Nick find common ground between the monsters and the humans, or does he have something more dangerous to worry about?

While Abnormal Attraction is trying to get across the idea of monsters being an analogy for race relations, it just comes across as inappropriate when those concepts are in a low brow comedy. This film is filled to the brim with lewd sexual humor, scantily clad women, and distastefully outdated humor. There is a version of this script that doesn’t have a 100 minute run time and isn’t as unsuccessfully preachy, that is goofy, fun, and weird, and that is not what we got. When you want your film’s underlying message to be about tolerance and trying to understand people regardless of their differences, the word Rumpelforeskin should not be uttered.

While Abnormal Attraction is a mess in terms of the script and plot, the same could not be said about the costumes, the special effects, and the acting. This is a film where the special effects are almost all practical and charmingly bad in a way that just shows a lack of budget, not a lack of imagination or passion. When the effects are not practical but CGI, they are used very sparingly and to a fun effect, such as a cyclops’ eye that has full lighting and didn’t look half bad. With this a feature that clearly has a small budget, I was quite surprised to hear the voices of Malcolm McDowell and Gilbert Gottfried giving good performances, along with the rest of the cast, on material that was far below them.

As I hate to say with most films, there is a fun and bizarre movie hidden inside Abnormal Attraction but it all takes back seat to a story that is attempting to be deep in the shallowest way possible. This is the kind of movie I could see being picked up by the “So bad its good” fandom, and for what it is, it isn’t terrible. Put it on with some friends who enjoy flawed movies and make your own jokes when the film’s jokes fall flat.

The film is now available on Amazon.

4 out of 10