Originally published at Forces of Geek
The featherweight plot of
1987’s The Monster Squad involves a gaggle of suburban kids who fend off
an invasion from Dracula and his coterie of creature-feature staples.
Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy… even the Creature from the
Black Lagoon puts in an appearance. Hey, why not? It’s that kind of film. It’s
also a rip-roaring good time.
The titular squad is
headed up by Sean (Andre Gower), an imaginative and personable kid who
broadcasts his extracurricular interests with his “STEPHEN KING RULES” T-shirt
and holds monster-centric club meetings in his tree house. Notable among Sean’s
acolytes are his toddler sister Phoebe (adorable Ashley Bank) and local bad-boy
Rudy (Ryan Lambert), who chain-smokes and dresses like he’s auditioning to play
Danny Zuko in a local production of Grease; naturally, the other kids
regard him with a mixture of fear and awe (Phoebe: “I heard he killed his
dad!”).
From his first appearance,
in which he vanquishes wannabe bully Jason Hervey with little more than a
well-timed arched brow, Rudy pretty much owns the film. If The Monster Squad
can be boiled down to a single iconic moment, it’d have to be Rudy, armed with
a bow and arrow, cigarette dangling from his lips, striding forward to deal
with the latest supernatural menace while snarling, “I’m in the goddamn club,
aren’t I?” Rudy, my friend, you are the goddamn club.
Comparisons to The
Goonies, the decade’s other enduring action-adventure film geared toward
the preteen set, are tough to avoid. If we’re choosing sides—though I see no
reason why we should—I’d have to align myself with Team Goonies, just
due to its broader scope and shameless sentimentality (Mikey’s “This is our
time!” speech was the most soaring rallying cry for young filmgoers since The
Outsiders proclaimed, “Let’s do it for Johnny!”). The Goonies’
bucolic coastal Oregon setting also trumps the generic suburban Everytown of The
Monster Squad, which never quite shrugs off the nondescript trappings of
the Culver Studios backlot. Still, The Monster Squad possesses a charm
of its own.
A hundred years ago in
Transylvania, vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing botches an ancient ritual that
would rid the world of evil. In the present, after Sean ends up in possession
of Van Helsing’s diary (his mom picked it up at a local yard sale), Dracula and
his accomplices come after him to prevent him from completing the ritual. Sean
and his friends team up with an elderly German neighbor (Leonardo Cimono) to
stop the monsters and vanquish evil. Sparkly mystical amulets, virgins, and
swirling portals to limbo are all somehow involved.
(At one point, the German
neighbor remarks that he knows a thing or two about monsters, and the camera
catches a fleeting glimpse of numbers tattooed on his arm. Placing a
concentration camp survivor in an irreverent kiddie flick about monsters could
be the height of offensiveness, but the moment is handled with enough subtlety
to pull it off.)
For what it sets out to
accomplish, The Monster Squad succeeds on almost all fronts. There’s not
much to gripe about the nifty creature effects, which were provided by
legendary visual effects whiz Stan Winston. Duncan Regehr makes an
appropriately sinister Dracula, while Tom Noonan does his best to give
Frankenstein’s monster a soul.
The endlessly quotable
script, which was co-written by Shane Black and director Fred Dekker, snaps and
pops with wisecracks. Sure, it drifts into blatant obnoxiousness more than
once, especially if one’s tolerance for fart jokes veers toward the lower end
of the spectrum, but after all, it’s a film for kids. Kids, I hear, enjoy a
good fart joke every now and again. Not all the dialogue stands the test of
time: The antigay slurs that slide so blithely out of adolescent mouths provoke
an immediate, forceful negative reaction. Don’t these kids know better than
that? Not in 1987, they didn’t.
Shane Black went on to
write the scripts for a number of blockbusters, including the Lethal Weapon
series. This is no surprise: Between the snappy banter and the big explosions
and the startling body count, The Monster Squad sometimes plays like
Fisher-Price’s My First Lethal Weapon Film. This holds particularly true
during the anarchic climax, in which the kids trade quips while taking on the
monsters, armed to the teeth with stakes, shotguns and handguns (loaded with
silver bullets, natch).
The breakneck pace only
falters when the film stops down to examine the unraveling marriage between
Sean’s cop father Del (Stephen Macht) and his mother, Emily. After backing out
of a marriage counseling session to tend to a police emergency, Del exchanges
this bit of dialogue with his wife:
Del: Look, it’s important.
Emily: I’m important.
Stop me if you’ve heard
this before.
This is well-trampled
ground. The script has the right idea: Anchor the fantastical action with
real-world problems to give the plot a little extra resonance. However, The
Monster Squad’s target audience (fart jokes, remember) isn’t going to feel
terribly invested in Del’s attempts to balance work and family. It’s Sean’s
movie, and the conflicts need to zoom in on him, not on his parents. If they’d
tweaked the script—if the friction had come from Sean’s reaction to his
parents’ squabbling—it could’ve been stronger. To go back to the Goonies
example, the main real-world problem might’ve been an adult one—the beloved
Goon Docks were jeopardized by greedy developers—but the focus was on the way
this affected Mikey and his young friends, not how it affected their parents.
(Maybe it’s unfair to draw
parallels between the two films—after all, nobody ever claimed The Monster
Squad aspired to be The Goonies, and they’re worlds apart in tone
and content. Still, it’s a safe guess the producers deliberately courted such
comparisons when they cast Goonies matriarch Mary Ellen Trainor as
Sean’s mom Emily, thus establishing a connection where none would’ve otherwise
existed.)
Pre-Monster Squad,
young star Gower was already a television veteran. Along with guest appearances
on shows like The A-Team and Knight Rider, he starred as George
C. Scott’s son on the early FOX series Mr. President, back in the days
when FOX was still the wonky and disreputable kid brother to the bigger
networks. Lambert, meanwhile, was a regular on Kids Incorporated, a
weekly exercise in delirious 1980s kitsch and child-actor humiliation disguised
as a tween variety show. Sadly, the series has never been released on DVD; for
those whose virgin eyeballs are as yet unsullied by the sight of preteen
Lambert and a barely-pubescent Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas wearing Day-Glo
outfits and chirping their way through soulless, irony-free covers of “Tainted
Love” and “You Belong to the City,” get thee to YouTube, posthaste.
While the cast has moved
on, The Monster Squad endures. In 2006, at a special revival screening
in Austin arranged by the website Ain’t It Cool News, director Dekker and stars
Gower, Lambert and Bank were feted with a heroes’ welcome. This little monster
movie has earned a big slice of audience goodwill.
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