I've not seen much in the way of positives posted about this movie. I'm going to stand alone in total disagreement and say that, for an asylum flick, it is honest, well thought out and comes across as a labour of love from all concerned. I very much enjoyed it.The two leads, Erin Evans and Sarah Lieving, did a most creditable job of portraying a pair of sisters who were amateur film makers, in their deportment, voice tone, and physical reactions to the storyline. Miss Evans especially did a fine job of portraying believable despair, and her simple attractiveness made her a protagonist worth pulling for. The dialogue throughout was consistently appropriate. In my opinion, the girls were solid actors portraying amateurs, and did it well. I've seen lots worse, especially in this genre. Director Erik Estenberg paced the action well, and was skilled enough to pull of a pretty fair Tokyo, filming in LA. Not bad.Action sequences were believable, and sometimes excellent within the budget constraints. The bombing scenes were especially effective, and the limiting of the monster to a few tentacles here and there and just one major showing, veiled by darkness, was appreciated. Thumbs up here.Flaws? Oh, sure. Mr. Estenberg could have chopped about 8 to 10 minutes off the film to tighten up the drama, and some of the survival decisions made by the characters were, shall we say suicidal and stretched credibility a tad. Not really a Cloverfield ripoff, I would say it is more like another movie in the same vein, not as well done but certainly watchable. But I'd like to counter the negative with some positives and hope a few of you reading this will give "Monster" a fair shot.And I would also hope to see the two leading ladies and director in other endeavours - the talent in this trio was evident, and makes the film click. I'll watch it again with no hesitation.

This movie is Bad. I mean really Bad, as much as I hate movies like Meet the Spartans and the Hurt Locker, I at least know that the people making those films are trying to make something good. This is a shameless rip-off, that they made, solely to make money after the success of Cloverfield.The plot is very similar to Cloverfield. Except instead of 6 teenagers in New York, we have 2 American sister reporters in Tokyo. They are interviewing a Japenese man when a horrible CGI tenticle comes up and begins destroying the city. So we follow the two through their adventures while trying to survive. I'm going to be honest, I haven't watched the ending yet, so I don't know what the monster looks like, but believe me, I don't care.And if you thought the camera in the Hurt Locker was bad, this movie is literally 45% static. Most of the movie I can't see anything, just a cheap way to get out of showing special effects.So is there anything I liked? Well, the two main actresses were actually pretty good. Not outstanding, but I do hope they have promising careers ahead of them.

Okay maybe this is not a rip-off of Cloverfield, and maybe I should not have watched it a few days after said movie. But still, Monster is almost exactly the same with chicks (you could sell anything with chicks, right?), without a decent plot, acting, and sadly, without a monster.We get two girls who are in Japan to make a documentary, when Tokyo is hit by an earthquake. And this is when the movie starts to get irreversibly bad and annoying. Because the two girls, however cute they may be, just cannot seem to use the camera. In the middle of a monster attack, *everything* is filmed, except for what is actually happening. When our heroines are staring with their jaws dropped at something supposedly terrible, the camera is well... showing them, their jaws dropped, staring. Then cut, or artifacts on the film (at every 5 seconds, or when something interesting is about to happen), and we go to the next scene. Rinse and repeat. In the end, we are given 90 minutes of artifacts, girls being scared and talking nonsense, running somewhere (filming each other's legs in the process), and just hanging out in Tokyo, obviously afraid of some tentacle monster that they always fail to capture with the camera.Besides of not being able to make a point (it is hard when you point the camera at your sister instead of at whatever is happening around you), the movie fails to convey a sense of plot. We know where the girls are trying to go, but we just do not care if they ever get there, or what happens if they do. There is simply no drama, no excitement, mostly due to the bad use of camera, and the long talky scenes, and short scary ones (usually cut by artifacts, or simply, darkness).I can't help but to compare this movie to Cloverfield, where you got a monster, and after some time, you actually got interested in where the group is going, and in the end, you cared. Monster could have been a great movie, even without showing the monster, if it manages to make you feel for the girls, but it sadly fails. It is not simply bad, but also an uninteresting movie.

My intro sums up my feelings on the movie and some of the comments on this site. The easiest way to elaborate is with an "I can't believe" list: 1. That someone paid to make such a painfully bad movie. 2. That I paid to watch it. 3. That some people on this site thought that there were good aspects of the film. 4. That someone thought that simulated crappy camera footage was a good idea for the entire length of the movie. 5. That the actresses said let's stop filming, put down the camera, please stop the camera, and so on about 50 times during the film but no one was mercifull enough to actually stop the f---ing camera. 6. That the monster was about as menacing as a kid in a Squidward costume (Sponge Bob reference) 7. That I hated it so much I joined this site to tell everyone.I don't care what anyone says, the acting in this movie was somewhere between a high school version of the princess and the pea and a really low budget porn movie. Some people liked the 2-3 cleavage shots but even if the two girls were nude for the entire movie it wouldn't have been any better. I kept hoping that the story would pick up and of course it never did; the only thing that I can say is thank god for fast forward. I think that I'll tell the video store that I want my rental charge refunded.