31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 25 (The Monster Squad)

'Cause this is Thriller, Thriller night...

One more little jaunt into the genre of kids fighting against monsters. This is a movie I have of course heard of, and I knew most of the bits going in. I still decided to give it a shot because someone brought it up the other day and I needed exactly one more thing to cover in order to fill up time between now and Halloween, when this 31 Screams nonsense ends. So, this is The Monster Squad, and that title does have an obvious double meaning. Sure, it's probably meant to be about the kids who know stuff about monsters and have a club, but it could just as easily apply to the five-monster squad of iconic horror movie critters who've banded together in this one. Like It, the base goal here is a celebration of all the old monsters. There's Frankenstein's Monster, a Wolfman, a mummy, a goddamn Creature possibly from a Black Lagoon, and Dracula as the leader of the bunch. Wait, holy shit. You know what? It actually did turn into all of these in the book. Only two in the movie, but he definitely became all five of these at some point in that book. Interesting. Very interesting. That still doesn't mean I dig The Monster Squad all that much.

The big objection, and probably the thing at the heart of this movie, is that it's too short. It's got an 80 minute running time. I was fine with Army of Darkness and whatnot for this because it was brisk. I didn't need Monster Squad to be a two hour movie, but 90 minutes would have done it. Maybe. What to pepper into that extra ten minutes? Making the main cast likeable, for one. Here we have a movie that feels like it wants to be The Goonies, but the kids in The Goonies were really charismatic and great in their interactions. These kids are not. The kids in Ernest Scared Stupid weren't either, mind, but they were a lesser focus in favor of letting Jim Varney ham it up. For movie protagonists, they're just sort of there and dealing with monsters. More to the point, they're kind of assholes. This is the kind of movie that terms like "problematic" were meant for. It's a perfectly functional movie that has basic entertainment value, but a handful of things that kind of jaw-dropped me. Like casual use of homophobic slurs, which I can't really judge as being period accurate or not because I was an infant in 1987. Worse is when the cool older kid basically blackmails a Monster Squad member's older sister into being their "pure maiden" who recites an incantation to suck all the monsters into a black hole. The cheeky fucker's taken pictures of her changing from her bedroom window and threatens to put them up at school if she doesn't help. And this is a protagonist! What in the fuck? That's fucking awful! Bullshit, Monster Squad! Bullshit!

The running time also leaves things feeling rushed. Our main kid sees a note that a Mr. Alucard called about his Van Helsing diary, and hears that a mummy got stolen from a museum plus the body of a guy who said he was a werewolf disappeared. He immediately goes into full on MONSTERS ARE REAL AND WE HAVE TO FIGHT THEM GUYS mode. What this could have used is him actually getting attacked by a monster and barely surviving. I dunno, anything other than a hasty conclusion like that. The monsters themselves are great, for what little we see them. You barely get any encounters with them and when you do they die quick. I seriously forgot the Creature was there until he burst out of the lake! Then he just gets a shotgun to the chest and dies! There is that neat bit where the Wolfman gets fucking exploded and his body parts come back together. Also, Wolfman's got nards. Something's to be said about the balance between good and evil and the mystic amulet and Van Helsing and all that jazz. I did like the straight-up admittance that Van Helsing's attack on Dracula failed with the opening crawl just saying "they blew it.". Frankenstein's Monster is a good portrayal, too, and befriending the little girl is a nice callback to the actual book. It's very sad when he gets sucked into the void, of course. He'd learned to be a nice guy. I guess the void is indiscriminate, as it sucked up like half of Van Helsing's dudes as well. That's Monster Squad. It's... okay. A little too short with characters that didn't endear themselves to me and one or two really off-putting elements, but the monster effects are great and there's lots of funny likes and explosions. I can see why it would become a cult classic, but it's not a new Halloween favorite on the level of, say, Dead Alive. Still, let's not get depressed. It's almost Halloween and it's time for the pre-emptive Halloween party! We'll have some fun for the next day or so before we go off and confront the Slasher with some very clever friends. Besides, we're going out for your favorite!

Pizza!