THE MONSTER SQUAD (1987)

 

DIRECTED by Fred Dekker

SCREENPLAY by Shane Black & Fred Dekker

STARRING -Andre Gower as Sean Crenshaw

Robby Kiger as Patrick Rhodes

Stephen Macht as Detective Del Crenshaw

Duncan Regehr as Count Dracula

Tom Noonan as Frankenstein's monster

Brent Chalem as Horace "Fat Kid"

Ryan Lambert as Rudolph "Rudy" Holloran

Ashley Bank as Phoebe Crenshaw

Michael Faustino as Eugene

Jonathan Gries as Desperate Man / The Wolf Man

Mary Ellen Trainor as Emily Crenshaw

Leonardo Cimino as Scary German Guy

Stan Shaw as Detective Rich Sapir

Lisa Fuller as Lisa Rhodes

Carl Thibault as The Wolf Man

Tom Woodruff Jr. as Gill-Man

Michael Reid MacKay as Mummy

Jack Gwillim as Abraham Van Helsing

PLOT - 100 years ago in Transylvania the ultimate battle between good and evil was fought and lost by the forces of good - Dracula and his undead minions where sucked into a vortex that trapped them in Limbo but unfortunately so where Van Helsing and his band of monster hunters - leaving a powerful mystical amulet (the source of evil's power) unguarded...

100 years later - in 1980's small town America, the monsters reawaken and return, still hunting the sacred amulet, only this time there's no-one to stop them. No-one, that is, except for the Monster Squad - a bunch of kids who love old horror movies - can the kid's knowledge of monsters help them save the world from the real deal ?...

PERFORMANCES - The kids adventure genre was a popular one in the 80's. Starting with the success of films like Speilberg's E.T. and The Goonies - which usually featured a band of kids encountering some kind of fantastical phenomenon - it wasn't long before that other staple of 80's cinema - the horror genre - was dipping it's toes into similar waters. 

Ultimately, this led to film's like The Gate and The Deadly Spawn - which where actual legit horror films in thier own right, complete with the requisite ingredients of blood and gore. Monster Squad has elements of this, but it's much more kid friendly than what was to come later. Think of it as a link in the chain between E.T. and IT, as well as being one of the many inspirations for Stranger Things.

There's a LOT of characters in this movie. So many in fact that most of them fall foul of the film's format and feel massively underdeveloped as a result.

Our main protagonist is Sean (Andre Gower) - a 12 year old middle schooler who's heavily into horror movies. Sean is probably the character we get to know best - his parents are hitting a rocky patch in thier marriage and his little sister is annoying him as she keeps plaguing him to join the Monster Squad - which is basically his little gang of friends who are all into monster movies as well.

As I said, Sean is the character we get to know best and Gower gives a good performance as the smart arse leader of the gang. The other kids are less well developed and three dimensional. There's "Fat Kid" played by Brent Chalem - so nicknamed because he's a kid and he's fat - his real name is Horace but you don't find this out until the penultimate scene in the movie. He's basically the comic relief and gets the best line in the entire movie (more on that later...)

Then there's Patrick (Robby Kiber) who's basically Sean's right hand man who only seems to be there to add his sister into the plot. Then we get Rudy (Ryan Lambert) who's the "cool" older kid - by cool I mean he wears a leather jacket and shades and smokes cigarettes whilst riding his BMX. He's not really that cool at all, being a 50's throwback he'd probably have gotten the crap kicked out of him at my school. Still he gets a good vampire killing moment in the film's final act so that's something I suppose...

Then there's the two little kids - Eugene (Michael Faustino) and Phoebe (Ashley Bank) who don't do much as they're...well... little kids. Phoebe gets a nice little subplot where she befriends Frankenstein's Monster though, which has some E.T. style vibes to it.

All the kids are well cast and do a good job despite how two dimensional their characters are. One of the things I really like about them is that they actually talk like real kids - complete with mild swearing, banter and lots of smart Alec crap talk. This is refreshing to see and definitely puts me in mind of the kids from Stranger Things.

Onto the monsters. Duncan Regehr plays Count Dracula and while he's no Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee he still does a good job of it. He's got a very cold way about him which does wonders, He even calls a five year old girl a bitch...

Then we come to Tom Noonan as Frankenstein's Monster. Noonan gives a lovely, heartfelt performance as the friendly, misunderstood monster. In fact it's down to his character that most of the film's feel good family vibes come from. I'd even venture to say that the way he humanises the monster is approaching Karloff levels of empathy....

But (there's always a but) the script let's him down in places. There's a part where the monster picks up the word "bogus" from the kids, from there on in he's forever describing any and everything he comes across as "bogus". It gets irritating VERY quickly. A word of advice to present day scriptwriters please, please, PLEASE don't use modern day kids slang in your scripts - nothing dates a film faster, the last thing you want is Frankenstein sounding like a Ninja Turtle...

The other two monsters are more of the "lumbering beast" variety and don't get much characterisation, although the Wolfman (Johnathan Gries) gets a few decent moments when he's in human mode.

SFX - As you'd expect it's practical effect prosthetic suit monsters all the way.

The Mummy and the Creature From the Black Lagoon in particular look AWESOME !!!!

SEX & VIOLENCE - Surprisingly there are a few sexual references in this film. Mostly it's down to the character of Lisa - the elder sister of Patrick - who the gang hire to read the incantation that will suck the monsters back into the void. The joke is that she's supposed to be a virgin until at the last minute she tells them that she actually isn't, she lost her virginity with an old boyfriend but claimed that he "didn't count".

The violence is surprisingly high for what's deemed to be a kids film - vampire brides get staked, police officers get maimed and killed fighting monsters but best of all is when Horace kicks the werewolf in the balls and comes out with the immortal line "WOLFMAN'S GOT NARDS" !!!!! - Violence with a dash of toilet humour, you can't go wrong.

Oh, and Wolfman gets blown to smithereens by dynamite but that's ok because his gored and bloody body parts soon reassemble themselves and it's not long before he's back in the fight (only a silver bullet can stop him, y'see, dynamite only slows him down).

RATING - This is a fun filled family friendly horror movie that's great for Halloween. It's by no means perfect - the characterisation is spread thin, it's tonally all over the place and some of it's more childish or dated moments can be a bit irritating (although I'm completely aware that I'm not this film's target audience...well, I WAS when it was first released but I'm an old fart now, so what do I know ?).

Faults aside though it's got a hell of a lot of charm to it and it remains probably the best final depiction of the classic Universal Monsters seen onscreen in (relatively) modern times (and NO - don't even mention the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing movie that they released in the early 2000's, I've tried to block that from my mind entirely). When it's good it's VERY good but when it's bad... it still manages to be OK.

3 and a half bitchy Dracula's out of 5.

ART -