The Monster Squad (1987) Starring Robby Kiger, Leonardo Cimino & Mary Ellen Trainor Directed by Fred Dekker Written by Shane Black & Fred Dekker

“Soon, Van Helsing! Soon the creatures of the night shall rule the world! And there is NO-ONE TO STOP US!”

Ask anyone about a movie called The Monster Squad, and you’re liable to get one of three responses.

First, and most likely: “What’s that? Never heard of it.”

Second, from the more movie-literate: “Oh yeah, I remember that one, kind of like The Goonies with monsters instead of pirates.”

Finally, a select few will go wide-eyed and exclaim something to this effect: “Oh man, that is one of the greatest movies ever made!”

The Monster Squad may well be a perfect example of a cult movie. It was not a commercial success on release. There are no big name actors in it. Outside of co-writer Shane Black (who went on to pen Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight and recently made his directorial debut with the excellent Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and executive producer Rob Cohen (who turned director with the likes of The Fast and the Furious, XXX and the latest instalment of The Mummy franchise), no-one involved in the film has gone on to do much of note. When VHS gave way to DVD, and practically every Z-grade film known (and unknown) to civilisation was rushed out onto the new format, The Monster Squad didn’t make the transition. It seemed doomed to be little more than a bump swept under the carpet of film history.

But in June 2007, after a long, impassioned fan campaign, The Monster Squad was at last reborn on DVD – and the cult is in such force, surely all that’s missing are the tracksuits and the Kool-Aid.

Surmising the plot isn’t difficult; Goonies Versus Monsters pretty much does it. A group of young monster movie buffs come to the somewhat shocking realisation that Dracula has come to their town, with all the classic Universal beasties in tow – the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Gillman and Frankenstein’s monster. Equipped with the knowledge of Van Helsing’s diary, the Monster Club becomes The Monster Squad, taking it upon themselves to thwart Dracula’s evil plot to conquer the world. (Cue portentous thunder and lightning.)

It’s easy to dismiss The Monster Squad’s appeal as mere 80’s nostalgia, that same sentimental impulse that leads mature adults to maintain that Transformers and He-Man were masterpieces of animation. By that line of thinking, it could easily be assumed that the only entertainment value The Monster Squad has is kitsch; that it’s a time capsule of long-since outdated trends, to be laughed at rather than with. Yet outside of a couple of bursts of admittedly cheesy pop music (‘Rock Until You Drop’ and the closing rap), there really isn’t all that much that binds The Monster Squad too stiflingly to the era. Sure, Ryan Lambert sports heavily gelled spikes, black shades, a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket, but those are things that have never gone out of style, unlike, say, the extravagant threads and flowing mullets of The Lost Boys.

Comparisons with The Lost Boys are hard to avoid. Both movies came out in 1987, and both feature youngsters doing battle with the undead. But, without dismissing its merits as an entertaining teen horror, the enduring popularity of The Lost Boys is due at least in part to the star status of its leads. People remember being fans of the two Coreys; people remain fans of Kiefer Sutherland. But when lifelong Monster Squad fans reflect, such associations don’t occur. Sure, we all saw Tom Noonan in Manhunter, Mary Ellen Trainor in The Goonies and the Lethal Weapon series, and Jason Hervey in The Wonder Years; the eagle-eyed may have seen Jonathan Gries take on another hairy monster role in Fright Night Part 2. But on the whole, when Monster Squad fans reflect on the movie, it’s just that: the movie, and nothing else. We identify the key actors only with their characters: Andre Gower is Sean, Robbie Kiger is Patrick, Ryan Lambert is Rudy. Knowing that Brent Chalem died in his early twenties might take us out of the movie a little, but he remains frozen forever in the audience’s mind as Horace.

There’s a timelessness to the movie that speaks to all ages. The quaint, classically Mid-American setting is a good part of this, with the white picket fenced suburbs, the treehouse hangout, and a town square that’s literally straight out of Back To The Future (the Hill Valley set was utilised for the final showdown sequence). Of course, this writer – being English! – could not comment on how true to reality any of this is, but regardless of whether it’s the real America, it’s the America we have all seen in the movies, harking back to the likes of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Particularly key to this timeless quality is the use of the golden age movie monsters, as opposed to the modernised vamps of The Lost Boys, or the deluge of masked slashers and alien creatures that mostly dominated the era. The classic creatures established by Jack Pierce, Bud Westmore et al are affectionately reborn into the 80’s courtesy of Stan Winston’s team, with only a touch of modernisation. They’re a bit more athletic and bit more fearsome, but they’re still clearly the monsters that we know and love from the films of Universal, and later Hammer. Since Winston’s death (a monumental loss to the movie industry shamefully ignored by the mainstream media), it has come to light that Squad’s Wolfman was in fact, possibly unbeknownst even to the man himself, modelled on Winston. Whether or not that includes his nards is open to speculation.

However, that fearsomeness has often been a point of concern regarding The Monster Squad. This is, after all, a movie in which our main protagonists are aged between five and fifteen, and there are those that feel the film goes a little too far with violent content and general political incorrectness. The children are placed in grave danger; the children swear, and make sexist and homophobic remarks; the children kill. The eldest even smokes. While most of this is an accurate reflection of typical youthful misbehaviour – excluding, or so one would hope, the killings – such content is not looked too fondly upon in child-oriented films today. Even producer Jonathan Zimbert (in Monster Squad Forever, the retrospective documentary on the DVD) has expressed regret over some of the film’s content. Of course, The Monster Squad is hardly alone in this when placed in the context of the time. This was the decade when Indiana Jones gave us melting Nazis and heart-ripping human sacrifice in PG movies. The PG-13 certificate was still new; neither the audiences nor the studios had quite figured it out yet, and as a result many of the early PG-13s are a little harsher than those being made today, Squad being no exception. But it’s not quite so grisly as Gremlins or Critters, nowhere near as potty-mouthed as Stand By Me (R-rated, but also starring a youthful cast), and considerably less dark than The Gate, another largely forgotten gem which stars a young, unrecognisable Stephen Dorff, and boasts genuine scares.

Even more unusual by modern standards is the remarkably brief running time. In a period when every new blockbuster seems to drag on beyond the two hour mark, it’s so refreshing to see a film clocking in at less than eighty minutes, but packing in every bit as much entertainment value if not more. It has been intimated that Shane Black was unhappy with how scaled down the film is compared to his original vision, but the brevity is a huge part of The Monster Squad’s appeal. There is no flab on this story. As soon as the plot is established, things rocket into motion and don’t let up. This is indubitably why the film lends itself so well to repeat viewing; just ask any fan how many times they hit rewind when the credits rolled, and watched the whole thing again straight away.

This is of course not to say that the film is without its flaws. Sean’s realisation that the monsters are in town is a little too neat, given that he doesn’t see any with his own eyes until Frankenstein shows up. The Mummy and Gillman are not given a great deal to do. The presence of Eugene is a complete mystery; why such a little kid is hanging out with boys on the brink of adolescence is unknown, and beyond saying “Mummy came in my house,” he adds very little to proceedings.

But to dwell on such matters is to completely miss the point of The Monster Squad. It’s a film that oozes fun; youthful enthusiasm and love for horror movies practically pours off the screen, a spirit so infectious that many children of the 80’s – this writer included – credit it for making them fall in love with the genre. Fans of harsher, darker horror might not accept it as anything more than a ‘kid’s movie;’ perhaps that’s fair enough. The Monster Squad is indeed a movie for kids – but that includes the kid that still exists inside us all, the kid that keeps alive the appetite for thrills and spills and mayhem and monsters. For adults, it brings back childhood emotions without being twee; for kids, it’s as good an introduction as any to the joys of horror.

Over twenty years of being ignored by the mainstream could not keep The Monster Squad down; it’s certainly not about to be stopped now.

As Rudy says, “I’m in the goddamn club, aren’t I?”

I know I am. And you?