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...