Party Monster: The Shockumentary

Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's 1998 documentary covers the New York nightlife scene known as the Club Kids and the figure at its centre, Michael Alig. Alig arrived from the middle of the country and became the city's best-known party promoter within a short time. The documentary follows that rise and the collapse that came after. During a period of deepening drug addiction Alig killed his roommate, dismembered the body and dumped it in the river. The film does not present the murder as sensation, but neither does it conceal how the people around him reacted; for a long time some of them thought it was a joke. The material comes largely from home videos of the period. Those recordings form a first-hand archive of New York nightlife at the end of the eighties and through the nineties. The same story was adapted into a fiction film in 2003. Who it's for: those interested in subculture history and nightlife documentary. Who it's not for: viewers who want to avoid drug use and the details of a killing; the film relays both directly.