I recently had the pleasure of re-purchasing my favorite movie growing up. It's the second time I've bought the DVD because I have a nasty habit of lending out all my favorite stuff to just about anybody, regardless of how well I know them or whether I'm sure I'll see them again. Odds are better than good I'll do it again but, to me, Monster Squad is one movie worth buying over and over.
    Granted, this is partly because for the longest time you couldn't buy it at all. Monster Squad was out of print for so many years that when the DVD was announced a couple years back I could've pissed myself. I didn't but, looking back, it was a missed opportunity. The only copy I'd seen before then was the VHS tape my parents had that got lost somewhere in the split. My sister and I ran that tape ragged through elementary school. There's no telling how responsible that movie is for so much of my taste to this day. Any time I discovered somebody else who'd seen it years ago on VHS we'd geek out and lament the heart-sickening travesty that it wasn't in print.
    Now we can just geek out and lament over some other heart-sickening travesties as Monster Squad is now widely available and back on my shelf. And for a film I fell in love with as a kid, it's held up pretty damn well.

"He's going to kill your son!" I drew scribbly werewolves all through elementary school because of this movie.

    Director and co-writer Fred Dekker describes the basic premise as "The Little Rascals Meet The Universal Monsters" and it's kind of like that, only way more awesome than you're imagining. A lot of credit goes to the script from Dekker and co-writer Shane Black. Yes, that's the same Shane Black who wrote Lethal Weapon and wrote/directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Since he's the more familiar creative element behind this it's tempting to credit him with a lot of the script's surprisingly hard-edged wit. This isn't the case if you've been fortunate enough to see Dekker's even more obscure debut, Night of the Creeps. Both films veer wildly between horror, comedy and dark, dark comedy while still taking the characters seriously, so when somebody you've grown to like and laugh at throughout the movie is suddenly taken out it really hits you. (In fact, from what I remember of Dekker's only other film directing credit, RoboCop 3, he wasn't shy about knocking off characters in an unexpectedly tragic fashion there either.)
    The dialogue is way sharper than any '80s genre-mutant has a right to be. Most movies are lucky if they've got just one line memorable enough to quote after viewing; Monster Squad is rife with them. Honestly, there are moments in this film that are so cool that it confounds you as to who this movie was aiming for.

For no particular reason Dracula gets all electro-sparky right before killing a bunch of cops with his bare hands, pulse-blasting an old man and making a little girl cry. That's rad.

    Look at it this way: you've got a handful of kids averaging out around ten years old, all of them talking as much shit as real-life ten year olds do, facing off against Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein's Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and a Mummy, all depicted in a serious, faithful and horrific manner. For subplots you've got one of the kids' parents on the verge of divorce and Lethal Weapon-style buddy-cop action. This is a movie where the kids use nude photos to blackmail a girl into helping them open a portal into limbo. This is a movie where the fat kid gets to cap a monster with a shotgun and Dracula calls a six year old girl a bitch. It's a movie about kids that's too adult for all but the most awesome or ill-supervised kids. So you can imagine it didn't break any box office records back in the day.

"I'm in the goddamned club, aren't I?"

    I highly recommend picking up the two-disc 20th Anniversary DVD, they did a damn good job of loading it with special features, way more than I could've hoped for back when all I had was the memory of a worn-out tape. The featurettes are all a hoot and it's great seeing so much of the cast and crew show up for interviews. It's downright bizarre seeing the Squad all grown-up. But I suppose it's downright bizarre being all grown-up.
    So yeah. Monster Squad. Go watch it. Demand sequels.
    I mean it. Maybe they'll listen to you.

"Come on guys, don't be chickenshit!"

Labels: film/tv