The Monster Squad (1987)

(In French, On TV, January 2020) As I dig deeper in the 1980s back catalogue, I’m sometimes amazed at the movies that I have managed to completely miss along the way. Given that I was 12 at the time The Monster Squad came out, I’m not sure how I managed to avoid knowing about the movie while I was growing up (Although I suppose that not having Cable TV and not speaking English might have helped). Now, I’m not going to claim that The Monster Squad is a great movie—at best, it’s a clever, reasonably entertaining homage to the Universal monster movies destined for teenage audiences. The plot barely takes the time to justify itself before sending its monsters (including The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in a hilariously short turn) in a small Midwestern town where they’re discovered and taken on by a group of misfit horror-loving kids. As I said, it’s not meant to be fancy, but to reintroduce the Universal Monsters to a younger crowd and wow them with makeup. It generally works: The young actors aren’t bad and the film has a bit of creative fun along the way (including the inclusion of a creepy old German man who ends up becoming an ally) even when it’s riffing off familiar clichés. Director Fred Dekker keeps things going, and if the mid-1980s sensibilities offer a rougher kind of tonal control than what we’re used to (as the film whips from horror to humour, best aiming for older kids), it does make for a far more interesting viewing experience. Adult horror fans should be particularly tickled by The Monster Squad, not only by the re-use of the Universal menagerie of beasts, but also from spotting Shane Black as co-writer, Tom Noonan in the credits, or makeup by Stan Winston. That’s not a bad set of contributors to an unassuming genre movie for kids, and the result is about as good as anyone could have hoped for.