My review was written in May 1986 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.
"Monster in the Closet" is a pleasant, occasionally funny combination of homage and spoof directed at the science fiction monster films popular in the 1950s. It will be appreciated by fans of old B-pictures but is out of step with the tastes of contemporary audiences.
Writer-director Bob Dahlin carefully apes the rigid format of the traditional monster opus (with corny dialog intact): an unknown creatures is killing Californians living in the small town of Chestnut Hills in their closets an San Francisco obituary writer Richard Clark (Donald Grant) is sent by his editor to cover the story. He soon teams up with science prof Diane Bennett (Denise DuBarry) and her brilliant child nicknamed Professor (Paul Walker) to follow the clues.
Monster eventually shows up, looking like a brown-skinned, huge-mouthed imitation of Carlo Rambaldi's oft-copied "Alien" creation, and the military, led by no-nonsense Gen. Turnbulll (Donald Moffat) steps in to handle the situation. It turns out the monster is impervious to conventional weaponry, leaving the star trio to invent methods of destroying it. In several funny twists, the monster's unexplained affinity for closets turns out to be a key script element.
Despite some dull patches in which parody becomes merely repetition of cliches, "Monster" is cute with lots of guest stars. Stella Stevens does a fine version of Janet Leigh's "Psycho" shower sequence, getting solid laughs opposite Paul Dooley as her husband. As a goofy old scientist, Henry Gibson has his moments, too. Moffat is perfect as the tough-talking general.
Lead players are fine, particularly Donald Grant, who, in film's well set-up and funniest payoff, turns out to be the object of the monster's affections (once his Clark Kent glasses are taken off) rather than the heroine.
Overproduced in relation to the targets of its parody, "Monster" is well-made (it was shot in 1983 and had post-production completed more recently). End crawl is unintentionally funny as what seems like a thousand people are individually credited or thanked for working on the picture. Film probably will be best remembered for the inspired silliness of its tagline solution to the monster problems, when the heroined goes on tv to plea: "Destroy al closets!".
