These days, it may be difficult to understand just how big a deal Michael Alig was back in his heyday. As The Guardian tells us, the 17-year-old Alig moved to New York from Indiana in the early 1980s in order to get a reprieve from his difficult family conditions and the constant bullying because of his homosexuality.

Alig soon established himself as a massive personality in the Manhattan club scene, and he eventually became the main promoter for prominent club owner Peter Gatien. His charisma and the combination of his outlandish getups and scandalous antics made him a popular figure in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as a talk show mainstay who was the de facto figurehead of both Gatien’s club empire and the Club Kid scene in general. As such, he was both a legend in his exclusive circles and a mainstream media figure who often prompted reactions from conservative media.

Unfortunately, much like the other clubbers around him, Alig was fueling his outrageousness with copious amounts of drugs. This, combined with peer pressure to constantly outdo himself, caused him to become erratic and sometimes outright nasty. One particularly unsavory story involves an incident in which Alig urinated from a balcony on a female bartender, who was then verbally abused until she cried. Alig has also admitted that he was in the habit of urinating in the drinks.

According to The Guardian, there are many versions of the exact circumstances surrounding Andre “Angel” Melendez’s death, thanks to the inaccurate depictions in various pop culture works and exaggerations by both the media and the Club Kids. The crime happened on March 17, 1996, and the perpetrators were Michael Alig and his roommate, Robert “Freeze” Riggs. 

Per Variety, the pair killed Melendez with a hammer and later dismembered his body and threw it in the Hudson river in a cardboard box. According to the Toronto Sun, they temporarily stashed the body in a bathtub filled with ice before the dismemberment. As The Village Voice tells it, Riggs brought the hammer down on Melendez’s head, but Alig was the one who killed him by hitting him over and over. The bathtub they used to store the body contained Drano, baking soda, and Calvin Klein Eternity. According to The Advocate, rumor also had it that the killers injected Melendez with Drano. Party Monster shows Melendez physically attacking Alig during an argument, and after Riggs hits Melendez’s head with a hammer a few times, Alig suffocates him and injects him with a syringe. 

In Riggs’ original statement to the police, Alig and Melendez had indeed been fighting, at which point he grabbed the hammer and hit the drug dealer. According to Riggs, Alig took the reins after that. First, he throttled Melendez. Then, he filled the victim’s mouth with detergent and closed it with duct tape.   

While Michael Alig was busy boasting about a crime his club circles didn’t quite believe he had done, the authorities were busy trying to figure out the identity of a dismembered body that had washed up on Staten Island in April 1996, per The Advocate. In October, dental records finally confirmed the deceased’s identity as Andre “Angel” Melendez, and an autopsy revealed several interesting details that seemed to fit with a very particular rumor that was making the rounds in New York City’s club circles. The investigators who went after the suspected killers found, to their surprise, that the club community was very reluctant to help them, choosing instead to protect Michael Alig with their silence. However, Robert Riggs ultimately confessed and revealed Alig’s role in the crime. 

According to Deadline, both Alig and Riggs pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1996. Riggs was paroled in 2010, and Alig was released in 2014 after serving 17 years. In an interview with Rolling Stone upon his release, Alig stated that he still has no explanation for the crime. “Not only is there no reason, there’s no justification,” he said. He also insisted that they didn’t actually intend to kill Melendez. 

The blood- and glitter-filled story of Michael Alig and his cohorts seems like a movie already, so it’s no surprise that it was made into one. Looking at it today, Party Monster managed to get quite a star-studded cast, with a combination of established names and up-and-comers ranging from Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin (who played Alig), Seth Green, and That ’70s Show mainstay Wilmer Walderrama to Chloë Sevigny, Dylan McDermott, and even shock rocker Marilyn Manson.

Unfortunately, it appears that Party Monster either failed to capture the story’s kitsch-filled drama or perhaps embraced it too well. As a look at the film’s Rotten Tomatoes page readily tells us, the critics utterly lambasted Party Monster. “There isn’t an ounce of genuine affection on display,” David Hansen of Newsweek said of the movie while also wondering why the filmmakers insisted on staying on the subject after already making a documentary about Alig. While audience ratings have been rather more generous, people weren’t actually rushing to see the movie. As such, Party Monster’s 2003 single-theater opening weekend raked in a measly $15,163, per Box Office Mojo.

Some might have found it strange to see Macaulay Culkin, most famous for his early work as Kevin McAllister in the Home Alone movies, playing Michael Alig, a glamor-obsessed clubber-turned-killer. However, in a 2003 interview with ABC News, Culkin himself pointed out that the role of a club hell-raiser isn’t quite as far-fetched for him as one might initially assume. “It’s so easy to see me as this wicked, little thing, you know?” the actor said. “This wicked little like, you know, blond- haired kid, making trouble for everybody.” Culkin also stated that he aimed for more artistic endeavors and tried to avoid doing the kind of movies that had made him famous. “I don’t want to do what I did before,” the actor told Barbara Walters. “Before, it was, you know, it was like people’s livelihoods were on the line … they like built an industry out of me.”

Culkin prepared for the role with a four-hour meeting with Alig in prison, listening to the man and studying his movements and mindset. In the process, he said he noticed that Alig appeared to be quite sorry for his actions but nevertheless seemed to be caught in his old club persona. “He seemed remorseful, but at the same time he was putting up this facade,” Culkin said. “He was putting on the ‘Michael Alig’ act for me, the wild and crazy guy.”