Day Twenty: The Monster Squad (1987)
It can be risky to revisit a film from your childhood. As children we don’t have the calculation that we do as grown-up, full fledged film obsessives and it seems a little perverse to go back and ruin a past movie for yourself when you’re so busy ruining present movies for yourself. Let a bad film at least be a good film in false memory if nowhere else. You can’t go home again as the famed literary someone wrote, and he may have been thinking of 1980s childrens films that skate dangerously close to self-parody when he wrote it.
My fear of revisiting The Monster Squad could be summed up in two words, “the” and “goonies”. I knew even then that Squad was more than a little indebted to the Richard Donner film, and this is bad news indeed. The Goonies has aged terribly, and if I had been an adult at the time, I imagine I wouldn’t have gone for it at all. The film is loud, obnoxious, vaguely offensive (particularly with Chunk) and just a general headache of 1980s tastelessness. I’m not trying to steer us down the PC road that seems to be strangling our art today, but it should be made known that not all fat kids are bird brained, food crazed mad men. Chunk is to fat children what the Mickey Rooney landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is to Asian stereotypes.
The Monster Squad is still a ripoff of The Goonies, but, aside from a regrettable Chunk wannabe, its not nearly as overbearing or desperate to be liked. The Monster Squad is agreeably slight, only 75 minutes, and makes sure to give most of the featured monsters, particularly The Gill Man, the Wolf Man, and The Mummy, a moment to shine. The Mummy gets a clever send off, and the Wolf Man has the opportunity to prove beyond a doubt that a silver bullet is the only way to kill him. For further analysis consult the aptly titled Silver Bullet.
Dracula and Frankenstein are a little disappointing though, even by the standards of nine year old boy who doesn’t question how easily the Van Helsing diary comes into a twelve year old boy’s possession. Dracula looks like a host of a notably unappealing Italian restaurant, and Frankenstein’s monster has the unenviable task of playing this movie’s version of Sloth. The Monster isn’t nearly as annoying as Sloth (it helps that he’s embodied by Michael Mann vet Tom Noonan), but one still can’t help but think the big guy’s getting sold a little short.
I’ve saved the best moment in the The Monster Squad for last and this scene alone marks the movie as ok to revisit: a scene of a boy and father, eating burgers and watching a slasher movie from the roof of their home through binculars as it plays at the local drive-in. This one moment, a reprieve from the trouble the father is having with the mother, gets at why some people turn to the movies at a very young age and never turn back. It has the gentle bliss of a Joe Dante film and for this I’ll forgive quite a bit.
October 20th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Sometimes I wish I could look at movies as a kid again when everything was cool. You kind of did that here, which is nice.
October 20th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
your hatred of the goonies utterly confuses me.
what’s your beef?
October 21st, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Sorry Ben, I loved Goonies as a kid too like everyone else, but I find it diffcult to sit through these days. The characters are shrill and obnoxious (except for the bad guys, who you damn near end up rooting for), the direction is overbearing, etc, etc. There’s only one scene of any real majesty, and that’s the pirate ship at the end, otherwise, its junky and annoying, at least in my humble opinion.