Party Monster

This documentary mixes crude video footage with over-the-top re-enactments to chronicle the rise and fall of Michael Alig, a Midwestern kid who quit college to become a party promoter in Manhattan's clubland in the mid '80s. Warhol had just died, downtown was declared dead, and Alig's parties mirrored the grotesque hyper-consumerism of that lamentable decade. His foray began innocently enough (drag queens, ecstasy, hot-bod contests) before spiraling into the glittering gutter of depravity, with hired performers demanding heroin, human-pee drinkers, blood-feast-themed soirées (replete with raw liver and buckets of blood), and the Christopher Street svengali's own increasingly erratic behavior. In 1996, the legless torso of Alig's drug-dealing roommate, Angel Melendez, was found in the East River; he'd been bludgeoned with a hammer, smothered, poisoned with drain cleaner, and dismembered. Despite Alig's bragging about the crime to his friends, it was nine months before the police went after him.

Acclaimed filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Drop Dead Gorgeous) are also directing a theatrical-feature version of the story. Although their crime-show-style dramatizations seem laughable at times, they nevertheless have crafted a chilling portrait of a drug-gobbling, megalomaniacal sociopath. Which terrifies more, the failure of his adoring friends to turn him in? Or Alig's own petulant, on-camera confession, three months before his arrest: was he one of those scapegoats that we hate and so we kill him?

-- Peg Aloi