The Monster Squad
My Review: This is a movie from the 80’s and it shows! It’s a classic like Goonies I suppose, only without all the quality. Dracula, Frankenstein, a swamp monster, and a mummy all show up in this town (and some guy in the town becomes a werewolf - it’s not clear how he gets that way, he seems to be a normal guy who ends up wolfified, but I assume Dracula must have caused it, as he is the mastermind of this whole invasion). But there’s a group of kids who hang out in a treehouse and call themselves the Monster Squad because they’re way into monster movies, and know all the stuff about garlic and crosses and silver bullets that
everybody knows (maybe in the 80’s not everybody did?). Said group of kids then proceeds to defeat Dracula at his sinister game.
What’s so annoying and dumb about this is the reason they succeed: all the badguys are unbelievably slow and impotent. There’s a scene where 3 vampire women are walking towards a kid with a bow and arrow (he has stakes tied to the arrows, I think?). They are first spotted about 100 feet away, and over the next two minutes of movie, they slowly inch forward as he first manages to shoot one with a stake, and then sits there fumbling for another arrow for the
entire rest of the two minutes until he can just barely stab the next one with a stake at point-blank range. It’s so pathetic on both his part and the vampires, it’s just cringe-inducing.
In another scene, the wolfman is threatening two boys and he literally stands between them, snarling and hopping back and forth to face them alternately for about 30 seconds as they have a conversation over whether it’s possible to kick a wolfman in the genitals. They discover it is possible, by kicking him and running away. I mean really, this is the level of threat they face, seriously??
Oh yeah, and also, the coolest and toughest kid in school is for some reason desperate to join this group of geeky losers. I didn't get that at all. Maybe he knew there would be monsters and they'd end up heroes.
My Rating: 2/5 Stephen King T-Shirts.
My Movie Idea: Okay, this time there’s only one movie I could do: do this movie
right. It’s a great idea for a movie, it’s just so badly done! In my remake, the monsters would be very dangerous. Fast moving, superpowers, a werewolf that can run you down and cut you in half in 5 seconds flat. All that stuff. But the kids will win in the end because (as silly as it is) they’re the only people in the movie who believe these are monsters and know all the legends and are willing to try them. They keep the vampire away with a cross and garlic, wolfsbane for the werewolf, whatever. And then they go all Home Alone on this stuff and do that movie thing where kids are smarter than adults and beat everybody with improvised traps and witty cleverness. That’s fun stuff! To be honest, every time I picture this, all I can see is The Lost Boys, which is basically what I would do, only with non-vampire enemies. That’s a good movie.
