MANILA, Philippines?The indie horror-comedy, ?Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer,? is low-budget, non-CGI-enhanced, and has no marquee-name stars. What it has a lot of are blood, gore, tentacles, and gross excretions. In spite of this?or perhaps because of this?the movie is surprisingly entertaining.

Though not as gut-bustingly funny or as gross-out gooey as ?Slither,? this Canadian production does manage to elicit more than a few decent laughs, and it has its share of memorable icky moments. However, a faster pace and a shorter set-up would have made it enjoyable all throughout.

Camping trip

Directed by Jon Knautz, the film stars Trevor Matthews as the title character, Jack Brooks, a twentysomething plumber with rage-control issues. Jack?s problem with his temper started when he was still a kid, right after witnessing his parents and younger sister being slaughtered by a Neanderthal-like monster while the family was on a camping trip.

The movie plays as a flashback, starting out promisingly in what is supposed to be an unexplored African jungle, where a couple of natives are battling a one-eyed monster. What it actually looks like is the backwoods of a North American suburb, where extras in bright costume face paint are pretending to throw spears at a guy in a rubber suit?you can?t help but laugh at the utter ludicrousness of it all!

But, just when you?re expecting things to get even better (read: campier), as we are introduced to Jack?s character, the film slows down and devotes too much time to the protagonist?s uninteresting therapy sessions and other ho-hum scenes.

With his shrill-voiced girlfriend, Eve (Rachel Skarsten), Jack is taking a science course at night under Professor Crowley (Robert Englund), who asks him to help him with a plumbing problem in his creepy-looking home. While trying to unclog the pipes, Jack unwittingly lets loose an evil force in the professor?s backyard! He drives home not knowing that, in a few hours, his professor will turn into a tentacled blob!

Scene-stealer

Matthews, who also produces, looks like he?s just going through the motions and is completely upstaged by Englund and David Fox. Englund hams it up as the mutating Crowley, and Fox, who plays an ancient clerk in a hardware store, is a scene-stealer despite being in only a few scenes.

While the film?s first half will try your patience, it picks up speed as the focus shifts to where it should be: Monsters and gruesome mayhem. Once students start running and screaming down the school corridors and tentacles slither in high speed across the floor, ?Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer? finally has you right where you want to be!