‘Where the hell am I supposed to find silver bullets? Kmart?‘
Man, the 80s was a weird decade. The Monster Squad is ostensibly a kids film, which is odd as it features a bunch of homophobic slurs, a discussion about whether or not a 5-year-old girl is a virgin (!) and the immortal line ‘Wolfman’s got nards!’. By the final scene in which the same aforementioned little girl is shouting ‘please don’t go Frankenstein’, as the famous monster fades into the distance, it’s difficult to know whether this is a film or some kind of fever dream…
OK. The plot. Monsters take over a small town. A group of teenagers, a monster squad if you will, must work together to fight back. And that is literally it. This is by no means a complicated movie, but then, nor should it be. At a skinny 82 minutes, director Fred Dekker says everything that he needs to say whilst still finding time to include a terrible rap song about monsters over the end credits.
Written by Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), The Monster Squad isn’t particularly smart and it certainly isn’t subtle, but it is genuinely funny in places and shot through with warmth. Despite not quite enduring as much as The Lost Boys (a film that would make a wonderful double bill with this one), The Monster Squad still holds up after all these years as a post Spielberg popcorn flick in the mould of The Goonies and Gremlins. Dekker treats the monsters with the reverence they deserve, and the young cast do a good job in making you care about what is, quite frankly, a preposterous concept.
After all these months of lockdown, it feels as though I am running out of films by this point, but The Monster Squad works as winning slice of nostalgia from what was a golden age of kids movies. Now, someone order me a Wolfman’s Got Nards t-shirt…