The Monster Children Guide To Picking A Surf Movie To Watch

If you read this site, or if you’re just “into” surfing, then you know there’s a wealth of good flicks touring around, premiering, and hitting the web right now.

There's Harry Bryant's Motel Hell, Noa Deane's MASH, Epokhe's Vacuum, and more. Maybe you’ve already seen one or more with all your friends and a beer in hand or maybe you're just waiting until it all rolls out on digital because you don’t live in California or Coastal Australia so you have to sit around until you can watch it at home, alone with a beer in hand. 

It’s all a bit overwhelming, isn’t it? Reality is so short attention-adjacent at the moment it’s hard to figure out where to start. Watch it all in alphabetical order? Throw darts at slips of paper taped up to your wall? Choose which showing is more conveniently located for you when they’re all playing on the one night of the one weekend you’re actually already doing something? Sure, maybe. I guess. But actually, maybe not. Yeah? No. Yeah, no.

Thankfully, we’re here (pressing fingertips to chest on the beat of each syllable) to (elbows bent, hands stretched out, and palms up) help you (same pose as before, only pinching each set of fingers together) choose your watch order. How? Well, by doing what we do best: compare every movie’s cast member’s drinking habits to our own and have you make the call. That’s right, we’re recording the pints in print and talking about surfers at the pub. This is what we think ripping into a cold can of snake piss would be like with every individual from the three biggest films in some time. And listen up, because even if this is truly hypothetical and doesn’t actually help you with figuring out which tab to click over to first when you’re watching (or rewatching) all these incredible flicks in a few weeks time, it’s important.

Harry Bryant  (Motel Hell / Vacuum)

Remember the Copacabana scene in Goodfellas? It’s like that, but only if Henry Hill looked you straight in the eyes and said in no uncertain way that he’s going to drink you under the table before smiling and slipping you a 20. You’re crumpled into a cab by 9 pm.

Wade Goodall (Motel Hell)

Classic Lord’s Day Sunday pub experience. 

Eithan Osborne (Motel Hell / Vacuum)

Hours and hours and fucking hours of Coors Lights. Smashed. He’s up for a dawn patrol the next morning by 6 am. 

Tom Lowe (Motel Hell)

This goes one of two ways: two quiet pints by the fire or he locks in a babysitter for the night and you’re questioning why you didn’t paddle out on all those days it looked a little too big while he keeps sliding you a full glass and talking about all those times he fell and fell and fell before bagging The Big One. You leave feeling all wobbly and inadequate but also inspired. You’re meeting up again next week.   

Dion Agius (Motel Hell / Vacuum)

Oh, now it’s fucking on. It’s just an absolute cracking evening in an old pub with a single pool table he insists on running while handing you loose change so you can play everything he wants off the jukebox. You don’t argue. Somehow you’ve had fifteen schooners. You barely feel it until the morning when you wake up needing to embrace death. Dion’s already in Tasmania when you text him.

Shaun Manners (Motel Hell / Vacuum)

I mean it’s just a killer time until you get home and your girlfriend gets really mad at you because you went to the pub with Shaun Manners and didn’t tell her.

Holly Wawn (Motel Hell)

The last time anyone made a list of the top hundred ways a night out with Holly Wawn could go, a “quiet, chill one” snuck in at number 87.

Craig Anderson (Motel Hell / Vacuum)

Doesn’t turn up.

Rolando Montes (Motel Hell)

See: Manners, Shaun.

Noa Deane (Mash)

A perfect evening, no notes.

Mitch Coleborn (Vacuum)

I mean there are no two ways about it you’re just going on a big, big one here, aren’t you? You start on the beers and then move on to more beers, and then of course there’s time for even more beers after that. Then before you know it the pub is closing in fifteen and there is no consideration of some final chance to escape safely and mostly intact. You can only plunge the knife into yourself and continue spiralling into the chaos of the evening. So, it’s nipping off to the corner store for a signature blue bag of cans to keep you occupied while you walk in circles to that other pub nearby that stays open one hour longer than everywhere else for some reason so you can slam down two more pints before they turn the lights on. From there, you’re rapidly transported to that one mate’s mate’s place where it’s can, can, can, weird room-temperature vodka thing, can, can, warm can, can, and a few hours of just falling into different bits of furniture. The resulting hangover is one of those numbers where it’s all bruise-like bags under your eyes, heart palpitations, and renouncing alcohol in all its forms.

Taj Burrow (Vacuum)

Have to sit this one out. You’ll only embarrass yourself. 

Jack Freestone (Vacuum)

Two of the most intense pints of your entire life. You can’t stop making unblinking eye contact and you’re way too self-conscious about it. He’s just so beautiful. 

Kaito Ohashi (Vacuum)

I know absolutely nothing personal about Kaito Ohashi, but I just briefly Instagram’d him and he looks like he’d be an absolute champion on a night out. You’re all ‘round Kaito’s house on the cans before you get the cab to the pub. Everyone’s in the back garden and the vibes are high and someone points at a half-filled glass with an ashed-out dart drifting around the top of it, "Would you smash that, Kaito, for banter?" And Kaito Ohashi says: “No, fuck off." And then someone raises the stakes: “$30, then." Kaito Ohashi sinks his beer before delicately pushing his hair back with his Epokhe’s so he can better eyeball the half-full glass that he’s now lifted in front of his eyes and notices it actually has three ciggies in the drink, and not one, how did no one notice that? Kaito Ohashi, downing it in one and snatching a crisp 10 and a 20 out of less-deserving hands. And Then Everyone Cheers. What a night. The best night of your life.

Occy (Vacuum)

You know when you get so nervous to meet someone you rehearse every possible dialogue option beforehand and it just comes out sounding like you’re meeting a couple sat opposite you at a wedding? It’s like that. Lift the glass up, lift the glass down. Talk about who you are and what you do and where you’re from and do one of those laughs where you show off all your teeth at all the wrong moments. You’re the NPC here.

Creed McTaggart (Vacuum)

A fun fact about music, and this is really only something you’d hear privately whispered once or twice in a lifetime in one of the Sony Music Entertainment offices where, other than a massive mid-century modern desk resting on lush, red carpet, there're floor-to-ceiling-windows overlooking both, somehow, all of Madison Avenue and Madison Square Garden, so, please, be careful with this information but, anyway, when Liam Gallagher sang, “Is it my imagination / Or have I finally found something worth living for? / I was looking for some action / But all I found was cigarettes and alcohol,” in Oasis’ “Cigarettes And Alcohol” he was actually taking about me. That’s correct, the song isn’t about the inherent appeal of drugs as a remedy to the banality and seemingly futile nature of working-class life. It's about how good it would be for me and Creed to get a pint together.

Jaleesa Vincent (Vacuum)

Reckon this is also going to be one of those things where you just feel like you have to apologise for, well, your entire existence there. You feel inadequate, and you’re not doing well enough, but Jaleesa’s so nice about things that the pint’s still a solid 8/10.

Dakoda Walters (Vacuum)

Feel like this would all go down like Kaito’s experience only he would be bantered into doing something way more diabolical. He’d eat gum off the bottom of the pool table. He’s scarf down a worm from the pub garden ground. He’d lick some graffiti above the toilets. And he wouldn’t even take the $30. He’d just do it for another free beer. 

Lungi Slabb (Vacuum)

I don’t think he’s old enough to drink? And that’s highly illegal, so we can’t endorse it.

Jai Glindeman (Vacuum)

You know when you meet someone way younger than you but they have their life put together in a way you feel the sting of every opportunity you passed up or skipped out on or just never experienced with each sip?   

Kanaiya Webb (Vacuum)

I need someone to call an ambulance on me at this point.