They Did the Mash

Film: The Monster Squad
Format: DVD from Bourbonnais Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

There aren’t a lot of kid-friendly horror movies. There are a few that are rated so that kids can see them--The Haunting is rated G and Poltergeist is evidence that it’s possible to make a genuinely scary PG movie, but these are not movies I’d put in front of a sixth grade kid. Even ParaNorman and Monster House have some genuinely upsetting moments. This is where a film like The Monster Squad comes in, at least in theory. There’s a reason that this is very much a cult movie, though. The true market for the film is a pre-teen audience, and the film is rated PG-13.

This is admittedly a hard line to walk, which is why this didn’t hit the PG mark. There’s some swearing (including a five-year-old girl being called a bitch) and references to sex as well as the sort of violence that is necessary when dealing with creatures like Dracula and the werewolf. Honestly, there may not be a legitimate way to have done this and kept it PG. The fact that’s it’s PG-13 is due entirely to the fact that this was at least partially from the pen of Shane Black, who is always reliable.

The opening sequence gives us the backstory. One hundred years ago, Abraham van Helsing (Jack Gwillim) and his team fail to destroy Dracula and his various minions, and don’t send him to Limbo via a portal. The portal is opened by an amulet that helps maintain the balance of good and evil—if it’s destroyed, evil will take over. Van Helsing’s friends send the amulet to the U.S., where it has remained for 100 years.

Well, that century is up, and the amulet is once again vulnerable to being destroyed and must be protected. Count Dracula (Duncan Regehr) is back, and he’s assembling his collection of the classic Universal monsters—the wolfman (Jon Gries as a human, Carl Thibault as the monster), the gillman (Tom Woodruff Jr.), the mummy (Michael Reid MacKay), and Frankenstein’s monster (Tom Noonan). Opposing them will be a group of kids who are fans of monster movies and the monsters themselves.

The group, which will eventually call itself the Monster Squad, is led by Sean (Andre Gower), and includes his friends Patrick (Robby Kiger), “fat kid” Horace (Brent Chalem), young Eugene (a very young, almost unrecognizable Michael Faustino), and Sean’s sister Phoebe (Ashley Bank). Early on, they will add tough, older kid Rudy (Ryan Lambert), who is right at the age where girls start to be interesting.

The story is that the amulet, which is naturally in the town where these kids live, becomes vulnerable to destruction every 100 years, an anniversary that is coming up. The kids get ahold of Van Helsing’s diary, and are forced to talk to the Scary German Guy (Leonardo Cimino), who it turns out is not scary at all, to help with the translation. All of this means that they need to find the amulet and protect it. A bigger issue is that they need a virgin woman to recite an incantation to open the portal to Limbo to get rid of the monsters—and the incantation is in German. The additional wrench in the works—one of the few things that helps the kids out—is that Frankenstein’s monster ends up befriending Phoebe, and thus the rest of the group.

Perhaps the most obvious connection here is to The Goonies. There’s absolutely no way that Shane Black and director/co-author Fred Dekker weren’t thinking of that movie while they were writing this one. Essentially, The Monster Squad is The Goonies minus the treasure and with Count Dracula.

What this ends up being is essentially a straight adventure film. The kids have to battle against the monsters, and at times need to use their own ingenuity to do so. Several of them get their own shining moment here and there as they battle the supernatural. There are some solid comedy moments—watching the mummy get unraveled, for instance. There are also some genuine scares here and there. It’s tame by adult standards (and by older teen standards, too), but for younger kids, the scares are just about right, and a death or two helps to maintain the idea that there are real stakes here. It’s probably not scary enough for a 14-year-old who likes horror and probably too much for a 9-year-old.

It’s also got a fun cast of character actors. Leonardo Cimino, Jon Gries, Stan Shaw, and Tom Noonan, for instance, are reliable workhorses for a film like this and most are immediately recognizable. The same is true for Jason Hervey as Horace’s bully; if you watched The Wonder Years, you’ll pick him out immediately.

The Monster Squad isn’t that scary, but it has a lot of fun moments. It’s not a bad entry into horror movies for younger viewers. If kids like this, they can graduate to something a little more on the edge. If they don’t this won’t give them too many nightmares, and they’ve learned that this sort of film isn’t their speed.

Why to watch The Monster Squad: It’s good fun.
Why not to watch: It’s a little too racy for its target audience.