Halloween Haunts: Monster Squad: An Appreciation by Patty Templeton

Halloween, to me, is about watching movies. Yeah, yeah, costumes and candy, too, but it’s mostly about the MOVIES. A hella fun flick I revisit nearly every Halloween is The Monster Squad.

1987 was not kind to The Monster Squad.

The New York Times said, “The Monster Squad looks like a feature-length commercial for a joke store that sells not-great, rubber monster masks.” The Washington Post was even harsher saying, “…the movie plays like it was written with a power tool.” It cost 12 million to make and yet recouped only 3 million at the box office. Geez.

But this…this is something horror fans have come to expect, that their movies and books are crapped on by the general public until the cult following is so big that you can’t ignore it anymore.

For those uninitiated in the pluck and light-horror that is The Monster Squad, here’s a brief run-down of the 82-minute horror comedy:

Van Helsing’s diary falls into the hands of a group of middle school horror geeks. They have a “Scary German Guy” translate the diary. For the world to be safe from Evil, the kids have to find an amulet and have a female virgin recite magic, German words on a specific night…or else Dracula and his monster gang will plunge the world into darkness.

No, this night isn’t Halloween…which truly feels like a missed opportunity.

Here’s something I love about this movie – it is family friendly, but by ‘80s standards. That means that you can have a 5-year-old girl call her brother and his friends “chickenshit”, you can have a tween boy use a shotgun to rip a bloody hole into Gill-man (re: think Creature of the Black Lagoon Dude), and you can have “cool dude” Rudy strike a match on the bottom of his shoe to smoke a cigarette. There may be a lapse in realism when it comes to certain plot points, but when it comes to framing kids as kids, this movie grabs a gold star.

I mean, yes, there are issues – like why couldn’t Van Helsing send Dracula back to Limbo himself at the beginning of the film? Why does a female virgin have to say the magic words? Why can’t it be a boy? Are you sure you’d be able to make silver bullets in shop class? Not one female in the horror club? Hmph. Really, a shining amulet contains the “Force of Good” and it becomes vulnerable to destruction on one day every hundred or so years and Dracula just so happens to be living above where the amulet is hidden in America when it becomes vulnerable? Hmm.

But why focus on that? Because, to quote Sean, our kid-leader, “Somebody’s out there killing people and if it’s monsters, no one’s going to do anything about it, but us.”

You just go with it. You stick with Monster Squad because it is like The Goonies, but with reinterpretations of classic movie monsters. Does the movie hold up? Eh…pretty darn well, I mean, the humor is solid, the youngsters’ relationships with each other and school bullies remain poignant, and the battle between Good and Evil is always gonna work on screen.

I don’t know what yer doing for Halloween…but I think I’m having a Monster Squad party.

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P.S. – Wolf Man’s got nards.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Patty Templeton is offering one print copy of her novel There Is No Lovely End. Comment below to enter.

PATTY TEMPLETON is roughly 25 apples tall and 11,000 cups of coffee into her life. She wears red sequins and stomping boots while writing, then hits up back-alley dance bars and honky tonks. Her stories are full of ghosts, freaks, fools, underdogs, blue collar heroes, and never giving up, even when life is giving you guff. She won the first-ever Naked Girls Reading Literary Honors Award and has been a runner-up for the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Award. Her first novel, There Is No Lovely End, came out this year.