“Staff Picks” is a deeper look into movies that we love here at Video CULTure. Each edition of this column will focus on a single film that we think you should check out, either for the first time or for a long-overdue revisit.
By Patrick Bartlett (Twitter: @alleywaykrew)
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved monsters. Especially the classic Universal monsters. I don’t ever remember being frightened by them as a child. I was just enraptured and fascinated by them. I truly loved them. I say all of this to make it clear how much my tiny kid mind was blown when I saw “The Monster Squad” on the video store shelf. It was like “The Avengers” long before that was viable. You had Dracula, Frankenstein(‘s monster), Wolfman, Mummy, and Creature from the Black Lagoon all in one movie. All working together in modern day (of the late 80s). Seeing it made one hell of an impression on me. However, it wasn’t like one of the Disney VHS tapes, priced to sell, that you could buy and hold onto, so when it disappeared from the video store, it was just gone for the longest time. I never forgot it though. I ended up finding a site and buying a t-shirt for the movie in my late teens. I bought a crappy bootleg dvd I found. When they remastered it in HD, I bought that slightly better bootleg. Then I got the real dvd as soon as that was released. When I got a blu-ray player, it was one of the first discs that I bought. If/when it gets a 4K disc, that will be something I have as soon as I possibly can. It’s probably impossible to put into words just how important “The Monster Squad” is to me but I’m going to do my best.
If you haven’t seen this film, I don’t really blame you. I’m sad for you but I don’t blame you. “The Monster Squad” was something that my brother and I were super into as children but it wasn’t until the dawn of the internet that I actually encountered anyone else that knew it even existed. However, the people that I spoke to about it seemed to have the same passionate affinity for it that I did… which, honestly, is somewhat rare in my experience. I’ve heard the director, Fred Dekker, say before that he wishes he got to make more than the few movies he did but he wouldn’t trade the passionate response of “The Monster Squad” (or his other masterpiece, “Night of the Creeps”) for anything. They’re movies that didn’t make much money and didn’t even seem to make much of an impact at the time. Somehow though, the people that they were made for saw them and held them close in a way that only a fraction of films can ever hope for.
I’ve heard the plot broken down into essentially the “Goonies vs. the Universal monsters.” I will admit that does give you a decent picture of what this film is. I don’t completely agree though. I disagree especially in terms of tone. I didn’t realize it until actually somewhat recently but “The Monster Squad” is definitely a darker film than “The Goonies”. By a fair amount. I realize that may have hurt it at the time of release but now is what sets this film apart and makes it unique. The main characters are Sean, Patrick, Eugene, Horace (aka “fat kid”, how rude), and the slightly older and super cool Rudy. They are a group of monster loving kids are just living fairly normal lives (normal for kids obsessed with horror, I suppose). They watch horror movies, they draw monsters, they talk about monsters and horror. Their parents seem shockingly supportive of all this and you love to see it. Sean’s mom even buys him an old diary written by Abraham Van Helsing. In it, Van Helsing describes an amulet that is essentially concentrated good. Dracula comes to their little town looking for it. Only once every few hundred years are the forces of good and evil balanced enough for said amulet able to be destroyed. Dracula brings the other legendary monsters along to accomplish the task of acquiring and destroying the amulet in order to bring a new age of darkness. Is it contrived? Sure. Did I care as a child? Absolutely not. Do I care now? Absolutely not.
It works because of Fred Dekker but also because of my writing hero, who is Dekker’s co-writer in this instance, Shane Black. The two of them may have brought forth the fairly simple and straightforward kind of story that you need for a kids movie but they also managed to create kids that were well-drawn enough that you could relate to or that you wanted to be (I still want to be Rudy someday). On top of that, the dialogue that is so smart that it still sings today. Granted, with Shane Black’s work, that goes without saying… but the fact that they made a kids movie that was treated as a real piece of work and wasn’t talking down to its audience is something that I didn’t know how much I should appreciate then but I damn sure do now. In addition to the script, Dekker’s direction, much like his direction for “Night of the Creeps” is pitch-perfect. The tone constantly walks the line between funny and scary without ever losing the power of either, which is EXACTLY what you need for a successful horror-comedy.
In a way, almost the most impressive thing about the film is the job tasked to legendary special effects man Stan Winston (may he rest in power). The monsters themselves are in the public domain but Universal’s legendary designs are not. This movie wasn’t made by Universal. This means that Winston had to create versions of the monsters that were instantly recognizable as what everyone knows them to be from those classic films, the picture in the head of the public consciousness…but also different enough to not get sued into oblivion by Universal. It’s such an insanely tall order that is made to seem effortless in the film. It almost certainly was not but that’s just how special Stan Winston was. I saw “The Monster Squad” as a very small child and there was never a second’s doubt what characters I was looking at. In addition to the monster designs, there’s solid blood and gore effects (especially for a kids movie) and maybe the first modern werewolf transformation I ever saw, which still holds up pretty well all these years later. The world just isn’t the same without Stan Winston but at least his work will live forever.
I really feel like I can’t say enough good things about “The Monster Squad”. Part of me never wants to stop talking about it but there’s really only so much I can say. My hope is that everyone ends up seeing it eventually and understanding exactly how special it is. It’s a landmark piece of work. You could argue there may have been stuff like it that came before, but it will always stand head and shoulders above everything else you could probably name. Hell, Universal tried to launch their own cinematic universe in recent years with the endgame of a big monster crossover and I’m not even sad I didn’t get it. You’d think I would be. I never thought it was necessary though because “The Monster Squad” already exists. It’s a film that clearly wasn’t made with a huge budget. It’s a film with no real stars except legendary characters. It’s basically the opposite of Universal’s attempted “Dark Universe” and despite that…it’s the perfect crystallization of the idea long before anyone ever thought of making a movie in the same vein. It’s something that I’ve basically always carried with me. I know I’m not the only one. I just hope it always sticks around. There’s few movies more deserving of that as far as I’m concerned.
To find out where this film is available to stream, click here: Just Watch