REVIEW: The Monster Squad (1987)

One hundred years before this story begins...
It was a time of darkness in Transylvania...

A time when Dr. Abraham Van Helsing...
And a small band of freedom fighters..
Conspired to rid the world of vampires and monsters...
And to save mankind from the forces of eternal evil...


They blew it.

That title scroll kicks off one of the most beloved films of my childhood, Fred Dekker and Shane Black's The Monster Squad. I still remember the day that I saw it in the theater with my parents and my brother -- there wasn't anyone else in the theater, which might be a clue to the kind of box-office this picture did. After getting my hands on a new copy of the film, I found other reasons why this movie under-performed. Before I mislead you any further, let me be up front about it: I love this movie, and watching it again brought back all the warm fuzzies that I had when I saw it for the 99th time as a child.

After the scroll fades away, the first scene opens on a stone statue of the Grim Reaper, sitting on a broken pedestal in the middle of an overgrown cemetery. The camera pans across the headstones as lightning flashes overhead, illuminating the graves, and then we come to a clearing of the trees and stop -- right on a dark, scary CASTLE! We cut inside to a torch-lit crypt, coffins lining the floor; one of the lids moves to the side a few inches, and out comes a parade of giant spiders, followed by the spidery fingers of a stone-white hand. The camera follows the dirt and moss on the ceiling, leading up to a giant, grotesque, writhing bat -- it twists, and screeches, the body transforming slowly into a man, and then with a sudden jump it flops to the floor, a full-grown, fully-dressed Count Dracula!

We jump to Van Helsing and the aforementioned band of freedom fighters charging the castle's gates, blowing them to bits with some dynamite. They run inside, and slay one of Dracula's white-gowned brides with a bolt through the heart. Van Helsing pulls out a glowing amulet, and commands a young woman to read some German mumbo-jumbo off of a scroll, as the castle shudders and skeletal zombies claw their way out from the floor! The girl finishes the spell, the amulet glows, and then a giant whirlwind forms and sucks everyone inside!

I'm not sure if I wrote a review of it or not, but Monster Squad's opening scene is everything that Stephen Sommers' recent Van Helsing failed to be. Squad is a movie about kids, starring a cast of kids, and it has exactly the kind of gung-ho 1980s mentality that appeals to children who more or less need a story with clearly-defined good guys and bad guys. I have the feeling that Sommers and Dekker wanted to make the same kind of movie. The difference ended up being in execution; Sommers' film was a plodding, dull, ugly mess that sucked out the inherent thrills! and chills! out of the characters, but Dekker's film seemed like it was directed with a "Gee whiz!" excitement and exclamation points on all the performances. It's incredibly fun, and that's why it made me so happy to go back to it.

After Van Helsing and his pals screw up the incantation, the story jumps one-hundred years forward to a 1987 middle (?) school, where Shaun and Patrick are getting sent to the principal's office again for drawing pictures of monsters during class. They've got this monster club with a couple of their pals, and their clubhouse (a really nifty treehouse fort) has walls plastered with their drawings and horror movie posters. Also in the club are Fat Kid, little Eugene, and their new recruit Rudy. Rudy seems to be much older than the other kids, but gets invited in on account of his preventing Fat Kid's ass-whooping at the hands of a bully. Rudy's obviously the "cool kid," since he is always -- ALWAYS -- wearing a black motorcycle jacket, and he smokes and wears sunglasses. (And he's got a kickass BMX bike.) As I mentioned, Rudy gets invited because of his heroics, but he stays because the treehouse is right across from Patrick's hot sister's bedroom window. There's also an adorable kid sister, Phoebe, who isn't welcomed into the club on account of the "No Girls Allowed" sign.

As it turns out, the amulet that Van Helsing was playing with is an object of "pure good," capable of destroying all monsters forever, provided that someone reads a certain incantation at midnight exactly during a celestial alignment that only occurs every one-hundred years. On the other hand, the amulet can be destroyed during that time, and so Dracula has come out of hiding to make sure he and his ghouls will live forever.

In the interim century, Van Helsing's disciples have hidden the amulet in the dark, creepy house located at 666 Shadowbrook Road, right on the outskirts of Shaun's town, and the Count brings his pals Wolf-Man, Gill-Man, Mummy, and Frankenstein's Monster to make a grab for it. Actually, he really just brings the Monster, and the other guys seem to have been fortuitously hanging around the town. That's the midwest for you, I guess. With the aid of the Scary German Guy and Shaun's cop father, the kids grab the amulet and save the day. I'm sure they all learned important life lessons somewhere in there too. They were probably in one of the montage scenes.

After seeing it again, I realize exactly why this I saw this in an empty theater with my parents: this is probably one of the last movies I would actually want to show children. The heroes of the movie are kids, to be sure, but they take on all the standard adult roles from the horror genre: they cuss, they smoke, and they save the day at the end by picking up shotguns and bows and violently killing the monsters themselves. It's like a little boy's nihilistic, violent fantasy, where he gets to play-act like the action heroes in the movies. This movie could never, never, never be made today, because the MPAA wouldn't just slap an NC-17 on it, they'd probably burn the negatives. I have absolutely no idea how Dekker got this made AND released.

I said that it was a kids' movie, but in hindsight, it's something different: it's a kids' movie made for adults. It's the kind of movie that you're supposed to view as a kids movie, from the vantage point of adulthood. It's something akin to pre-packaged nostalgia, a reproduction of the feelings and fantasies we had as youngsters. It's much more than just a fond nod to the creature features of Universal Pictures, though; it's a full-on tribute to the feelings and dreams that those movies inspired in little kids, and also a surprisingly honest one. It's not only about the sense of excitement, it's also about the very real and very dark undertones of revenge and violence that kids have when they watch adults in the movies, bravely killing their monsters. I doubt that it's a coincidence that Fat Kid redeems his courage in front of his bullies by picking up a shotgun and blowing a bloody hole in the Gill-Man's chest -- he wanted to show them that he could be as violent and dangerous (or rather, more violent and more dangerous) than they could be, and Gill-Man almost happened to be a scapegoat in the wrong place at the wrong time. Poor Gill-Man, never getting any respect.

I read a recent interview with Fred Dekker, and he mentioned that he and Black didn't consider this movie to be a kids' picture at the time. When I first read that, I figured he was off his rocker, but I think I understand now. This isn't a kids' movie at all, at least not in the sense that we want it to be. Sure, it works as a great pulp adventure (violence and cussing aside), but I think it's much more sophisticated than that. If you're not into, you know, levels of text, then you can certainly have a ball just going along with it, because it's great fun anyway.

The fun part comes largely from Dekker and Black's script, which has a ton of fun with genre conventions without trying to actually rebuke them. It's pretty clear that the two of them understood exactly what was so incredibly thrilling about the old horror films. There's a sense of danger, of course, but it's kept broad enough that it's outweighed -- ever so slightly -- by the idea that the scariness will be entertaining to overcome. Like the old Universal films, Squad's masterstroke is getting the audience to enjoy playing along with the idea of fear, much more than actually inspiring fright of any kind; it's the way that a kid's mind works. For something similar, you can check out Fred Dekker's other great film, Night of the Creeps.

I'm going to make a presumption that Black was responsible for the movie's many great lines of dialogue, since he's becoming known for his especially witty genre-bending scripts (including The Long Kiss Goodnight and the just-released Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). The performances by the kids range from really good to passable, but even the worst of the deliveries is defeated by the dialogue itself; when they nail the lines, they really soar. The adults, too, are all played by actors that seem like they're having a great time, and their performances really shine. I give extra credit to Stan Shaw as Detective Sapir, because he had my favorite line in the movie while he was interrogating the night watchmen about the missing mummy exhibit.

I don't want to sell this movie too hard, but I'm still reeling a little bit from being reminded exactly how much I love it. It's entertaining and satisfying in a way that's becoming more and more rare for me these days, and underneath that I believe it might actually be saying something about the genres it's playing with. It's fast-paced, it's funny, and it's absolutely worth seeing if you missed it on its initial release eighteen years ago. I think it's probably even more worth seeing if you did manage a viewing or two as a child. (Although that makes me wonder what kind of adult supervision you had.) Go dig into your local VHS bins, or hop onto eBay and get yourself a copy.


*quietly singing*Rock until you drop, dance until your feet fall off...

REVIEW: The Night Strangler (1973)

Only a year after dealing with a vicious vampire in 1972's The Night Stalker, Carl Kolchak has yet another run-in with supernatural evil in the sequel, The Night Strangler. I guess that's a major conceit of all recurring characters in supernatural-related series: they come across incredibly rare unnatural events as though they happened every day. It's a conceit that most audiences are willing to forgive, because overall it's better to have unlikely things happen than to be bored to tears while we wait for something else interesting to occur. I'd hate to think of the realistic version of Kolchak, where he murdered the vampire in part one and then we spent twenty TV seasons watching him languish in jail.

Thankfully, we're treated with a little suspension of reality, and Kolchak -- now trying to peddle his vampire story to papers in Seattle -- runs into his old curmudgeonly boss, Tony Vincenzo. It seems that the vampire debacle also got Vincenzo tossed out of his job as editor, and he's taken up residence in the northwest, again behind the desk of another popular newpaper. Feeling bad for Kolchak's downtrodden state, he gives him a job, and all the old trouble (and fun) begins again.

Another series of murders has begun in Seattle, with each of the lady victims murdered at night, with some blood loss. Kolchak immediately questions whether this might be another vampire on the prowl, but the county coroner confirms that they've only lost about 5ccs of blood, which is a little light for a bloodsucker. Also: small needle marks instead of bite wounds, and the women all actually succumbed to intense strangling and crushed throats. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this was the inspiration for the title.

No, this is no vampire (although he might still be considered a stalker, technically. He stalks, after all. This is the same manner in which I consider myself a writer.) It seems that similar murders occurred twenty-one years prior in Seattle, all happening with young women in the same neighborhood, all killed in the same manner and in the same number of days. Even more mysteriously, the same circumstances apply twenty-one years prior to that, and twenty-one years before those, as far back as 1868. Sounds fishy!

After much digging and some playing around in a big underground city, Kolchak uses his reporter ways to find the truth: a civil war doctor has almost found the secret of immortality. He's created a potion that will give him youth for twenty-one years, and as it begins to wear off he takes on a corpse-like visage, causing him to come back out into the night to steal blood to make a new batch. Sounds like a good deal to me, although I can't quite figure out why he didn't just steal blood from a blood bank or something; even the Night Stalker thought of that. Since the puncture marks were at the base of the women's necks, maybe it had something to do with spinal fluid or something. I guess it's not really important.

What is important is that Darren McGavin rules the world once again as Carl Kolchak, and this TV-movie is filled out with another talented cast, including the eponymous John Carradine. (Carradine was in two-hundred fifty-one movies in fifty-seven years, and had at least appearances in one-hundred and four TV shows. That's a lot of not taking any vacations.) Simon Oakland also returns as Vincenzo, and Richard Anderson plays the Strangler -- I spent the end of the movie wondering where I'd seen Anderson before, and the IMDB tells me that I'm recognizing him from playing Oscar Goldman on the "Bionic Man" series. And he was in "Knight Rider," so I'm probably having nostalgia fits in my cerebral cortex just from checking his resume.

I'll have to be honest: this movie was fun, but it's not as good as The Night Stalker. Stalker was interesting because I really didn't know if the villain was going to turn out to be an actual vampire -- the show was very procedural, and it had me guessing as to whether they'd find out the vampire was real or just a crazy guy who thought he was undead. Going into the second movie, I now know that the supernatural does exist in Kolchak's world, so that some of the underlying mystery is gone; this time it was replaced with the mystery of simply finding out what kind of ghoul he was, and where to find him. It's slightly less engaging, since the endless fights with the editor and police seem like they're more or less retreads of the first movie. After a while, I was getting bored -- the police are confronted with evidence, they want to cover it up, Kolchak saves the day, story gets covered up, everyone gets fired. I saw forty minutes of the exact same thing two days ago, and I would've liked to have seen a new spin on it this time.

Still, McGavin and Oakland really played their roles to the hilt, and once again the screen crackled with energy. There were several scenes of their arguing that had both me and the Lady Retropolitan laughing out loud. ("Where are you going?") I was really impressed by the smallest nuances of McGavin's performance: the tilt of the hat, the foot stomping, and even the way that he stretched himself out on Vincenzo's couch. I think that it was their contributions to the movie that really stood out and made it worth watching, as well as Wally Cox's turn as Mr. Berry, the awkward police researcher that helps Kolchak find the Strangler.

Overall, The Night Strangler is a fun hour and a half, although I'd be lying if I said it was a really solid piece of entertainment. I got bored at more than one point, despite my high praise for the cast. The plot just wasn't very compelling, and the script unveiled the mystery in spurts; there were some loooong trips between plot points, and the majority of it is revealed close to the end. The performances kept me occupied for most of the in-between parts, but it wasn't really enough to keep me focused. In the end, I still recommend it, but with some reservations -- don't expect to be enthralled by the story. Just sit back and enjoy the bickering.