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| Seriously? "A monster-ous good time" was the best tag line they could come up with? |
The
Monster Squad (1987)
Dir. by Fred
Dekker
Starring Andre
Gower, Duncan Regehr and Tom Noonan
[content warning:
brief mentions of homophobic jokes, concentration camps]
Plot:
A club of monster
movie-obsessed pre-teens learns that monsters are real when Dracula comes to
their town, accompanied by the other Universal horror monsters, in search of a
mystical amulet that will give him the power to permanently upset the balance
between good and evil.
Nostalgia:
I grew up
watching this movie. I don’t consciously
recall seeing the original Universal horror movies until I was in college, so
this was almost certainly my cinematic introduction to Dracula, the Mummy, the
Wolf Man and others. In recent years, my
family has embraced The Monster Squad in the way that a lot
of millennials have Hocus Pocus. We watch it every Halloween after trick or
treating ends.
Review:
Continuing
with this unplanned series of mid-80s “kids in serious danger” movie reviews,
we have The Monster Squad.
This one is nestled right in the “cult classic” zone, neither as widely
beloved as The Goonies or little-known as Cloak
& Dagger. It’s actually
very heavily inspired by The Goonies, from the mix of
personalities in the club to the life-threatening dangers they have to face
along the way. Mary Ellen Trainor (the
mom in The Goonies) even plays the mother of the main
character here. However, I think that the
supernatural plot differentiates it sufficiently enough for the film to stand
apart from its influences.
Speaking of
influences, the movie leans very hard on a familiarity with monster movies in
general and the Universal horror pictures of the 30s-50s in particular, while
also being a PG-13 movie marketed at a demographic much younger than the
average horror aficionado. This leads to
an odd unevenness of tone, where the movie veers wildly from comedy to horror
and back again. It contains both graphic
sequences where characters get blown up with dynamite, and a scene where one of
the kids kicks the Wolf Man in the groin and is surprised that he’s “got
nards!” However, I think that this
shifting of tone makes a little more sense when you realize that the movie was
an early script by Shane Black, whose Lethal Weapon pulled
off the same thing much more successfully earlier the same year. Many of his scripts, such as Iron
Man 3, The Nice Guys and Kiss Kiss Bang
Bang, display a similar mix of serious action and humorous banter. It’s just that this one involves kids, so I
feel that there was an inclination for him to go with what he perceived as a
more “juvenile” sense of humor, which only serves to heighten the clash in
tones.
 |
| Scary monsters and silly parents: a study in contrasts |
That isn’t
to say, of course, that I don’t appreciate the humor or writing. I actually find the dialogue and interactions
between the various Squad members to be very believable, and quite true to how 12-year-olds
might have actually acted in the mid-late 80s (I’d like to say that I know that
from experience, but I was only five years old when this movie came out). Of course, that also means that there’s a
current of true-to-the-period casual homophobia in some of their insults to
each other. Also, the sole PoC in the
movie (which is doubly glaring given that it’s obviously set somewhere in the
American South) is the skeptic cop who doesn’t take anything that’s going on
seriously, and gets blown up to start the “shit gets real” finale.
Finally, I
want to take a moment to praise the design and portrayal of the various
monsters in the movie. While the style
of werewolf used isn’t my favorite – I never felt that the Universal Wolf Man
read as a “wolf” all that much without any sort of actual muzzle – the makeup
itself and the transformation sequences are quite well done, if a little
short. The movie’s Frankenstein (which
they accurately identify as being the name of his creator, not the monster, and
then go ahead and use for him anyway) evokes the classic Boris Karloff makeup
while being updated for then-modern techniques.
And the version of the Creature From the Black Lagoon makeup created for
this movie is perhaps the best fishman creature makeup pre-Shape of
Water. While the lead
villain, Dracula, is saddled with a fairly cheesy costume taken right out of
the Bela Lugosi movies, Duncan Regehr gives it his all, bringing a subdued,
quiet menace to every scene. He’s
actually one of my favorite portrayals of Dracula in any movie.
 |
| You know, the Mummy doesn't really do much in the movie. He's just here so he won't get fined. |
So yeah,
looked back on as an adult, I can see how the movie has a bit of a tone issue,
and how some of the horror elements had to be toned down to make this into a
family-friendly movie. However, there’s
still a lot to like about the movie.
Certainly enough to where it deserves a place alongside Hocus
Pocus as a cult Halloween movie.
Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B+
Stray
Thoughts:
-It’s clear
that the creatures themselves weren’t all that they studied about the classic
Universal movies when making Monster Squad. In the original Bela Lugosi
Dracula, Dracula’s castle was populated by armadillos
(native to North America) instead of rats, and hyenas instead of wolves. Sure enough, in the first scene of
Monster Squad, Dracula wakes up from his crypt in
Transylvania and two armadillos go running off in the background.
-This is yet
another movie with a couple of significant Star Trek connections. Duncan Regehr (Dracula) was
Shakaar on DS9, and the main character’s dad, Stephen Macht, was also on the
show in the three-parter that opened season two.
-The reveal
that the “scary German guy” that all of the neighborhood kids are afraid of,
and whom they reluctantly turn to for help, is actually a concentration camp
survivor is not done particularly subtly.
However, given how young I was when I first saw this, I’m not sure I
actually understood the implications of the number on his arm for some time.
-[minor spoilers
for the general plot concept of Brandon Sanderson’s
Mistborn (highlight to read)]:
-“Wolfman’s
got nards!”
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