The Monster Squad (1987)

1987
Directed by Fred Dekker
Starring Andre Gower, Duncan Regehr, Stephen Macht, Stan Shaw and Tom Noonan

Most kids in my age bracket know about this flick.  Released in 1987, some people actually consider The Monster Squad a better version of The Goonies then, well, The Goonies.  I can't say that I watched this movie a ton as a kid; I think I caught it once on TBS in the early '90s, liked the hell out of it and swore to the very heavens that I'd record it the next time it popped up.  Two weeks passed, and I forgot about it.  Now, here we are some 25-odd-years later and I'm a grouchy 32-year-old.  Does it hold up? 

The eagerly awaited answer to that question: Yeah, pretty well.  I don't think it's QUITE as good as The Goonies, myself.  But if I'd watched this movie constantly as a kid, I probably would have liked it better.  These were kids who were into all of the stuff that I was.  Comic books, movies, video games...you name it.  And they got to drop a lot of four-letter words, shoot guns, and kill stuff.  As such, this is still a movie that has a massive cult following after its initial box office disappointment.  In that vein, it's very similar to Night of the Creeps, which was also directed by Fred Dekker.  In addition to Dekker, we've also got Shane Black co-writing the screenplay - he of Predator, The Last Boy Scout and Iron Man 3 among other things.  Folks, remember the days when movies aimed at children weren't completely pussified and had an edge to them?  The Lick Ness Monster remembers.

This is yet another one of those movies that practices the "less is more" approach, and I love it.  82 minutes long, and that's including the ending credits, so we've got no time for bullshit.  Meet the Monster Club, led by wise guys Sean (Andre Gower) and Patrick (Robby Kiger), cool kids who spend their days debating how to kill werewolves and vampires and discussing the merits of old Universal monster movies.  In addition to that, the first time we see Sean he's wearing a shirt that reads "Stephen King rules."  Rounding out the group is Horace (Brent Chalem), a scaredy cat dubbed "Fat Kid" by everyone else in the movie; Eugene (Michael Faustino), a rather nondescript kid who brings his dog to all of the meetings; and new recruit Rudy (Ryan Lambert), junior high rebel who rocks the '50s retro thing like a boss.

Back when I first saw this movie, I thought Rudy was purely and simply the shit.  If I'd managed to commit The Monster Squad to VHS tape back then, I probably would have wanted to BE Rudy just like I wanted to be Corey Haim's character in Watchers.  Even these days, this guy is undoubtedly the coolest thing that the movie has going for it.  More importantly, Rudy gives the group a good balance of different personalities, which makes the action stuff pop better once it starts to hit.

When this movie came out, it was a much-ballyhooed renaissance for all of the classic Universal monsters together in one movie.  We've got Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Gill-Man and the Wolfman all on the bad guy side of things.  Well, mostly, but you'll have to watch the movie for yourself to find how that works out.  It seems that Abraham Van Helsing failed in his attempt to rein in evil at the conclusion of Bram Stoker's novel (which was a nonfiction book, I guess, according to this flick - it isn't really spelled out), as some sort of way-out-there ritual involving a virgin reading German incarnations must be utilized to throw the bad guys into a temporal vortex.  And it's...almost as confusing as that last sentence reads, but it doesn't matter.  At any rate, these guys are now in the present day of 1987 looking for an amulet that will let them take over the world, and only the Monster Club can stop them.

The flick doesn't exactly hit its three-act beats like a Spielberg movie; at times, it is a little all over the place, as we get some protracted bits of humor involving Rudy peeping on Patrick's hot sister and all of the stuff with Sean's policeman father that repeatedly goes nowhere.  I can't say that it matters much.  All of the child actors here do a pretty damn good job with their characters, so much that the batshit insane and occasionally illogical story is easily overlooked.  Once it comes time for them to take the amulet back, steal some wood stakes and arrows from shop class and go monster hunting, the movie is firing on all cylinders, and the climax is pretty damn thrilling.

And it's got Dracula openly calling a five-year-old girl "bitch."  The things we don't get in movies these days.

If there's only one other complaint that I have about this flick, it's that the dude playing Dracula didn't really hit a home run.  I personally think it would have been really cool if they'd managed to get Christopher Lee to play the role, but then again, that wasn't the Universal studios incantation of the character, it was Hammer, so what do I know?  Fortunately, the movie DOES have Tom Noonan as Frankenstein's monster.  Noonan is well-known (okay, by movie nerds like myself) as one of the all-time great creepy villain actors out there, and he's aces here once again.  Get this guy a gold-star for selling Francis Dolarhyde and the Last Action Hero Ripper like a motherf**ker, because he's dynamite.

That about sums it up.  I'll give The Monster Squad *** 1/2 out of ****.  This flick has cool kids, cool action sequences, and a pretty decent story backing it up.  And it's easily available via handy-dandy Netflix instant streaming.  You can't go wrong with 82 minutes of prime '80s goodness here, and it's well worth a watch.