I’m baffled by movies which bring together famous fictional characters that would not normally be associated with each other. An example which comes to my mind as such a failure is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. More successful, but still confusing to me, is 1987’s The Monster Squad.
I had not seen it until 2024, as I was just a bit older than the target audience on its initial release. It’s strange I do not distinguish between kids and adult fare today, but two years back in your early-to-mid teens is almost a generational divide. This was one a film for the Nintendo bunch, and I was on Team Atari.
This film brings together some of the famous horror monsters of the early Universal era, though with enough differences to skirt potential trademark violations. You have Dracula (Duncan Regehr), Frankenstein’s Monter (Tom Noonan), Wolfman (Jon Gries and Carl Thibault, as the human and monster versions, respectively), Gillman (Tom Woodruff, Jr.) and The Mummy (Michael MacKay). The uninitiated might be wondering what a Gillman is, and it is basically a store-brand Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Dracula is the clear leader of the group. We first see him a century earlier, when he is battling Van Helsing and other humans. There’s a young villager reading a scroll, and it isn’t clear yet whether what she’s reciting is supposed to open or close that vortex that has opened in the room. Nor do we know the role played by a gem in the center of the room and has lasers shooting out of it. We already know this mission will not be a success, as a text crawl already informed us, “They blew it”.
Such language is typical of this deeply 80’s movie, which is the timeframe the monsters find themselves. How they went from Germany to Los Angeles is confusing, though the vampire, at least, arrived by cargo plane. Why they are there is far more baffling. Yes, they followed the path of Van Helsing’s diary to there, but why did that end up halfway around the world? Also, the reunion of the monsters happens in a swamp in the vicinity of L.A., and I must have completely missed such an area in my one trip out that way.
That diary ends up at a garage sale, where it is purchased by the mother of Andre Gower, due to his interest in horror films. This twelve-year-old is the leader of the titular club, which includes curiously bland kid (Robby Kiger), fat kid (Brent Chalem), a younger than the bulk kid (Michael Faustino), and a kid well enough into his teens to not be hanging out with the others (Ryan Lambert). Auxiliary members of the group include Gower’s much younger sister (Ashley Bank) and Kiger’s older sister (Lisa Fuller).
Together, this group needs to prevent the monsters from destroying that amulet we saw in the first scene, something that is made of pure good and is indestructible…except for a brief period at midnight every 100 years. Of course, that anniversary will just happen to be the next night. Given the earliest scene in the film took place in Europe and now we’re in California, I was wondering how the gem knew to adjust for time zones. I also wondered if it observes daylight savings time.
This film is evenly comedy and horror/action. Chalem gets the best lines, including the one of “Wolfman’s got nards!”, which is widespread enough for me to have been aware of it without having seen the movie before. My personal favorite line is when he, having been called “fat kid” by everybody else in the picture up until one point, is holding a gun while saying, “My name…[cocks shotgun]…is Horace!” But many other attempts at humor fell flat for me, such as Bank teaching Noonan’s Frankie 80’s slang, so we have the legendary monster going around saying stuff like “bogus”. Huh.
There are many other words the kids use which I’m betting parents of the day were less happy with. No F-bombs are dropped, but the film still earns its PG-13 if only for the other copious profanities. More disturbing to modern audiences will be the repeated use of the slurs “homo” and “faggot”, though I will concede that is how kids talked back then (and worse). When I see films made today but set in that era, the kids never sound entirely like they would have back then because of such omissions. I know that doesn’t make it OK—it is just an observation.
In addition to that language is some surprisingly gore and gruesomeness, bringing the work just inside the grey area where it could have easily been rated R. Of particular note is a scene with the wolfman exploding, and I had not expected the camera to linger for so long and so close on the bloody body parts. Then again, this is a film that knows its intended audience had already been seeing films above their age group, as suggested by this line from the five-year-old Bank: “We’re at war with Vietnam. It was in Rambo.”
The filmmakers also expect viewers to be familiar with the classic Universal films which originally had variations of the monsters used here. One smart tribute to the original Frankenstein is when Bank and Noonan first meet, which recalls a notorious moment in that film. Fortunately, the scene here does not end in the same way.
I have often wondered how I would regard cherished films from my childhood if I had not first seen them at the age when I was the ideal audience. Take The Goonies, for example. I doubt I would appreciate that much if my first exposure had been as an adult with a full-time job and a mortgage. Flipping that around the other way, I only saw The Monster Squad almost four decades after I should have originally seen it. I didn’t entirely dislike it, but I can’t imagine wanted to see it again. And here I am wondering if I would feel any differently if I had seen it in my mid-teens.
My one last thought is I how I could help but recall the movie Cabins in the Woods the entire time I watched this, and how Bradley Whitford’s character was obsessed with the Merman. Given the very similar Gillman here, I like to think Whitford wore out his VHS copy of The Monster Squad.
Dir: Fred Dekker
Starring Andre Gower, Robby Kiger
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray