Tom DeLonge, best known as the on-again off-again (currently on) guitarist and frequent lead singer for blink-182 as well as Angels & Airwaves, has dabbled in film before but now makes his directorial debut with this mixture of Californian suburbia, stoner humour, and the paranormal. These Monsters of California – hauntings, UFO sightings, and more – are investigated with obsessive passion by teenager Dallas (Jack Samson), with some help from his archetypal slacker friends Toe (Jack Lancaster) and Riley (Jared Scott), who have less of a personal stake in such things and seem to be in it mostly for the opportunity to slack off. The trio may well represent the members of blink-182 themselves; it requires a deeper dive into the band’s discography than “All the Small Things”, “What’s My Age Again?” and other lovelorn, hormone-soaked pop-punk classics, but yes, like The Stranglers, 13th Floor Elevators and Muse, blink are among rock music’s pre-eminent UFOlogists.
What we get, then, is sort of a mixture between the adolescent 90s in which blink reached peak commercial success – think American Pie – and the films DeLonge would have grown up on; the secret-riddled, adventure-promising suburbias that have become inescapable in the decade of Stranger Things, such as E.T., The Goonies, Stand By Me and IT. Whether it’s the filmmaker’s enthusiasm for the various stripes of Fortean Times-type phenomena – which include UFOs prominently, but don’t draw the line at ghosts, cryptids, psychic abilities, and much more – or whether its an excess of affection for the science-fiction-adventure genre, we get an odd and unsatisfying anthology structure, dealing first with a haunting, then a sort of side-quest for Bigfoot, then a more substantial UFO-focused final act. Only the last succeeds in avoiding the feeling of padding, because it manages some genuine excitement despite the script’s habit of undercutting its moments of tension or emotion with dick jokes. The effect of this, also, is that the characters feel shallow and fairly obnoxious, giving to the ending a sense of unearned sentimentality. It’s a long and fairly trite voiceover reflection on life, the universe and everything that would feel hacky even in one of those bad, later-season X-Files episodes, and here serves only to end what might have been an OK adventure-comedy on a sour note.