Fred Dekker

  • Night of the Creeps (1986)

    Night of the Creeps (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) While Night of the Creeps may not quite be among the very best 1980s blends of horror and comedy, it’s certainly in the top tier. It begins with an homage prologue to 1950s horror films before moving to “present day” 1980s and a sorority/fraternity party that turns ugly when parasitic alien slug-like creatures show up to transform everyone into zombies that then explode to birth more slugs. Whew. Everyone in this production, but none more than writer-director Fred Dekker and veteran character Tom Atkins, are treating this with the mixture of genre reverence and self-aware humour that the material deserves. The result is quite entertaining—sometimes funny, sometimes gross, but never too gross to erase the fun nor too comic to trivialize the horror. Clichés abound and many characters die, but the entire thing remains good fun all the way to the end. Night of the Creeps is more than worth a look if you’re going through 1980s horror and have already watched the big hitters of the decade.

  • The Monster Squad (1987)

    The Monster Squad (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.