The Monster Squad

Rating: 4/5

The first thing that came to mind after I watched this was that they sure don’t make kids/family films like this anymore. Back in the 80’s kids were vulgar, they swore, they were really mean. It seems now when you watch a kids/family film the kids are too nice, they don’t say ’shit’ or anything like that. Which is rather funny because I would say real kids today are actually rather vulgar. I’ve said it once and I will say it again, these films today are far too ‘PC’ and when you go back and watch something like The Monster Squad you are glad the 80’s had the balls.

The Monster Squad is actually quite a fun film, there is a group of kids who call themselves the Monster Squad, they are experts on the old school hollywood monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein. Little do they know these monsters are in fact real and headed to their town to cause trouble led by Dracula. They are in search of an amulet which will let them control the world and it is up to the kids to put a stop to them.

Now how cool does that sound? Very cool and it actually is very cool! I’d love to be in their monster squad because that is the kind of geek I am. I would have loved to have had a club like that as a kid (Actually my friends and I had our own UFO club), it would have been awesome and this film makes it seem awesome. All the kids in the film are likable (not the bullies, but they get theirs) and they all put in some really good performances. They feel like real kids, and our main character Sean (Andre Gower) shares a very real relationship with his parents who are having their own troubles. I really liked that the film went to the effort to develop all that. They didn’t need to but they went that extra mile and it really works. It helps you really get behind Sean, again he is a likable kid.

The actual monsters are really well done for this type of film, not too scary looking for the kids but scary enough that some might get the creeps. Dracula played by Duncan Regehr is really quite good, they gave him that classic look and there is a bit of a campy feel to him which worked perfectly for the film. I really liked Wolfman played by Carl Thibault, he knows he will turn and he wants to be locked up, he doesn’t want to cause the chaos he knows he will. It works, the scenes at the police station are classic. Michael MacKay as The Mummy is good even though he isn’t in it much, it was still fun to see. Gillman (aka The Creature from the Black Lagoon) was anther not in it much but the look of the character was really good and it leaves us with a great pay off. Frankenstein played by the great Tom Noonan was awesome, I loved him. The friendship he forms with little Phoebe is just great, it has heart and I liked that.

The Monster Squad is one of those awesome 80’s gems that everyone should see if they haven’t already, and if you haven’t seen it since the 80’s or early 90’s check it out again! It is such a fun film, there is not much to fault with this at all. Everything works really well and you enjoy being with this group of kids and you get behind them in trying to stop Dracula. It does suffer from some campyiness but that works, and some bad acting aside I would say you can’t really go wrong with this. I can safely say I highly recommend this one folks.


(Review written Feb 15th 2010, first posted on SuperMarcey.com)

Last updated: 2010-02-15 16:24:52 by SuperMarcey

I guess I should have known there wasn’t going to be much to this thing when the biggest name to come up in the opening credits was Jason Hervey, best known as the big brother from The Wonder Years. Believe it or not, the film didn’t get much better after that.
I think my opinion of this is more related to expectation rather than reality, but I was highly disappointed in what I saw this afternoon. I mean, I wasn’t expecting anything too special, but for some reason, I thought this would be more on the level on The Goonies, but instead of searching for treasure, they were fighting monsters. Maybe that would have been a better idea that what this mess was.
The good…the wolf-man. Plain and simple, he’s the only character worth mentioning, to be honest. The filmmakers decided to go more with a Jekyll & Hyde version of the werewolf, and it worked. We on;y get to see him transform. No, it isn’t on par with some other werewolf transformations seen on camera, but it’s far being one of the worst.
The bad…look, if I sit here and list everything bad about this picture, we’ll be here until the cows come home, but the major wrongs are a bad story/script, special effects that look like they were bought out of a gumball machine (which is bad…even for the 80s), and actors that don’t sell their characters.
I know there are thousands out there that have made this a cult classic. Many of them are likely to hunt me down for not loving this flick, but I just can’t bring myself to do so. Often times there are bad films that are so bad, they’re good. This is one of those that is so bad it is bad. I can’t belive they actually wasted the time restoring it and putting it on DVD. There are so many other better films that those resources could have been used on. Don’t waste your time with this one, unless you’re a fan.

http://thankyounetflix.wordpress.com