Review re-printed from The New York Post, June 18, 1998

THE KID WHO BECAME A 'MONSTER'By MICHELE GREPPI --------------------------------------------------------------------------------TRUTH is stranger than most fictions in the downtown world where you ain't nothin' if you ain't a carefully calculated freak of naturetrying desperately to be anything but a nobody.

"Party Monster" is a British-made, hour-long guided tour of a subculture that often makes print as a glam life, but that instead seems to make Hell look like an all-expenses-paid vacation to Club Med. It's about the rise and fall of Michael Alig, self-made king of downtown's Club Kids; about the life of a twisted child of the Midwest and the death of his drug-dealer roommate; and about those who still seem to find rather child-like and innocent the land of sieve-like bodies, unnaturally cut and colored hair, drug stews, chameleonic sex lives, disposable identities and fame for fame's sake.

"Monster" is a fascinating creep show that doesn't draw any moral bottom lines for the viewer. It doesn't spend (or waste) time trying to figure out how a kid with "an ornery smile" becomes a cultural scam icon and killer.

Neither does it kick around the logical chicken-and-egg questions that arise when a troubled kid in Dallas or Miami watches "Geraldo" and sees a Michael Alig being lionized just for being (or at least looking and talking) weirder than most folks can comprehend. But watch "Monster" and you cannot help but see the talk-show hosts who traffic in human oddities as pimps for the Michael Aligs, who, feeling out of place in the real world, try to create one with an atmosphere, however fetid, in which they can breathe.

Alig blew into Manhattan from South Bend, Ind., where a mother who could have been cast by Jerry Springer or Jenny Jones or the old un-reconstructed Geraldo Rivera, recalls him taking a nice girl to the prom.

Only later, after he'd gone to New York to attend Fordham, did shelearn he was gay.

But by then, Alig was a party promoter of much note in a city where the worst sin is to be boring and she was being ferried to his birthday party at The Tunnel by limo and kissed by the bizarrely
dressed characters he'd helped create and make famous.

Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, who can be spotted in atleast one of the photos of Alig's series of "outlaw" parties, which were designed to invite the cops, likens Alig to "the Mother Goosecreating all these little fairy tale characters." Angel Melendez was one of those hangers-on. A drug dealer who wore elaborate wings, he'd worked and partied at such carnal centers as the Limelight, where, as ample footage attests, the entertainment took "in-your-face" to a whole new level.

There are few body parts not displayed and put to, um, creative use during this hour, which will not be appreciated by the champagne industry.

James St. James, one of the more hard-to-classify forms of life in the club world, says that "there is a place for you if you feel like you're a freak. If you've got a hunchback, throw a little glitter on it, honey, and go out and dance and show the world that it's OK."

Gitsie, who died of a drug overdose earlier this year, heard Alig's siren call on "Geraldo" in Miami and followed it to New York. She doesn't think Alig and Freeze, another drug dealer/Club Kid, should have killed Angel and then hacked off his legs before dumping his torso in the river, but, she tells the unblinking camera, she still loves Alig.

St. James, stretched out poolside in a darling ensemble, his everpresent chin chain hanging from the hole in his lower lip, contributes an anecdote about the era in which peeing or vomiting and drinking were one and the same thing for Alig's Kids. "'Course, he was always peeing on people but because he was so charming he pulled it off," says St. James. "You would always end up saying, "Oh, that Michael ...'"

Michael Alig certainly wanted to pretend he found himself endlessly cute.

Three months before he was arrested, when rumors even more bizarre than the truth were flying, Alig looks right into the camera and says that Angel "was a copycat ... and so we killed him. ... I killed Angel."

Then he turns coy, rolls his heavily made-up eyes and says, "That's the kind of thing that gets me in trouble."

In an interview in prison, a drab Alig says, gee, he wishes he hadn't done what he did, but he's glad he was able to cop to manslaughter and not murder because when you get charged with murder, "they don't give you a VCR in prison."

Oh, those Kids. Just be glad they're not yours.