A Disciplinary Approach to The Monster Squad (1987)
The Monster Squad (1987) – Disciplinary
Happy Spooky-ish Season to those celebrating! So far we’ve talked witches with Hocus Pocus and misogyny with The Stepford Wives, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Yesteryear (if you listened to my talk last week). This week, we’re going for spooky scary monsters in the Shane Black- and Fred Dekker-written cult classic The Monster Squad (1987).
Note: I had never seen The Monster Squad, and as we were watching it, I was kicking myself for using the whole “it’s not fucked up, it’s just the 90s” gimmick with Hocus Pocus because this film is socially fucked up but it’s just the 80s.
The Review Roulette wheel landed on Disciplinary as our approach, and, unfortunately, I have so much to say about that. My favorite piece I’ve ever written is about the history of film adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, culminating in a review of Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 version, and, honestly, if you’re only going to read one thing of mine today, I’d be fine with it being that one if you wanna switch now. I absolutely killed it in that piece. That article is my “Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967”.
So, for this review, I’m going to just talk about the monsters themselves and the things they do in this movie that seem outside of the canonical characters but also kinda make sense for this film. The Monster Squad is a hilarious, heart-wrenching, misogynistic cult classic film about a group of lovable dorky 12-year-olds who are obsessed with monsters (particularly those of the Universal variety, it seems). When the amulet of something or other that gets activated every 100 years wakes up Dracula or something, he raises his ghoul friends (and maybe lover?) to destroy the amulet and usher in a reign of monsters or something. I wasn’t super clear on the specifics, and I’m not sure the film is either. There’s a whole thing with Van Helsing and the amulet opening a wormhole to limbo to hold the monsters with a virgin girl reading some German, and they do open that wormhole, but none of the monsters go into it for some unexplained reason other than Van Helsing and his boys “blew it.”
So, anyway, Dracula and Co. arrive in maybe LA, potentially the swamps of Louisiana, who is to tell? He and the boys including the Swamp Thing that later has gill sex with Sally Hawkins, a nondescript 2000-year-old mummy who I guess is new to the crew because he was already in a sarcophagus in town so he never hooked up with Drac for the Van Helsing blowing, a wolfman who doesn’t want to be a wolfman, he wants to be a real boy, and the crème de la crème of Universal Monster beaus, Frankenstein’s creature whom the boys make a distinct point is not named Frankenstein himself, which they promptly abandon when they start calling him Frankie. Dracula is also, like, very obviously sexually excited to wake up Frankenstein’s creature with jumper cables from his lightning rod, wolf-head capped pimp cane. He’s like caressing the creature and moaning softly as he wakes up and, I don’t know, I just feel like if I were Swamp Thing, mummy, or a conflicted wolfman, I’d feel kinda sidelined by the whole interaction.
So, the main boy’s mom brings home Van Helsing’s diary for some reason, and they go to the Scary German Guy who lives down the road to translate it. Get this. Turns out Scary German Guy isn’t scary at all, and we learn that first because a kid is like “wow, a WWII plane model” and for a sec you’re like “ruh roh” but it’s an American bomber. So SGG translates Van Helsing’s diary and is like “what an odd book” but then drops some knowledge on those kids about monsters and they’re like “you sure do know a whole lot about monsters, mister” and he’s like “yeah, I suppose I do” and he closes the door on them, pushing his sweater sleeve up a little, and he has a number tattooed on his wrist. WHAT. What the fuck, Shane Black, you creative freak? This delightful little film with all the childhood misogyny of the 80s rammed in and all the extremely loud, unconscionably loud children like in E.T. or The Goonies gets right in your face and says “maybe the Nazis were the real monsters all along?” and you’re like “well, yes. I never said otherwise, but golly was I not expecting that reveal.”
And of course, there’s an argument to be made about monsters in our stories being the creative expression of horrors here on Earth. Vampires are capitalists and all that. But, I don’t know, that reveal is crazy and goes nowhere else.
The kids ultimately overcome the monsters, but not before the monsters start throwing bows. The Swamp Thing legit just hits a man, snaps the guy’s neck. I didn’t even know you could do that with flippers for hands. And really, they’re just getting in fist fights like all over town. I kinda expected that the monsters would have some kind of, like, supernatural power or something, and that’s on me, because they’re just coming down from the top rope, just hitting suplexes, metaphorically. Dracula just punches people in the face. At one point, a bunch of cops show up to deal with the monsters, getting up in Dracula’s path to the kids. Dracula maintains a slow walking pace while just decimating the town’s entire police force. He has one guy in a headlock and I really thought he was gonna “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself” that guy, but he drops him unconscious to the ground instead. And, actually, the only time Dracula does have a superpower for assault that’s not turning into a bat or transparent or whatever, he shoots like an ineffective ball of light into a Holocaust survivor and that just feels unnecessary.
Dracula is a really interesting guy in all this. He’s A Lot, again, perhaps has a thing with the creature, makes him call him “Master” and what not. And as said, Dracula has watched his fair share of the WWF. But he also walks up to a five-year-old and calls her a bitch and, I’m sorry, that’s so funny for a grown ass man to do. Dracula is campy as hell and also channels Arnold and the action boyz when he throws a lit stick of dynamite at the kids’ empty treehouse, turns his back, and says “meeting adjourned”. Classic. Dracula, King of the Night? More like Dragula, Queen of Being a HOT. MESS. Girl, damn.
I’m obligated to talk about the creature too because he’s my good time boy. Last year, I spent all of my time preparing for that piece linked above, so in addition to all the adaptations I covered in that article, I wrote a monster series of reviews including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Frankenstein (1931), Gods and Monsters (1998), The Birds (1963), and The Blob (1958) and earlier this year, Young Frankenstein (1974), as part of a Mel Brooks series. I’ve thought a lot about Frankenstein’s creature, and this film does something I truly love.
Frankenstein’s creature in The Monster Squad is a beautiful soul who befriends the cute little five-year-old Dracula calls a bitch and helps the kids open the wormhole to limbo so Van Helsing can come through and choke a bitch out. It’s a really sweet connection with the lineage of film adaptations of the story, calling back to and revising the creature happening upon a little girl by the water and accidentally killing her. It might be my favorite intervention with any of the monster lore predating this film.
Also, I don’t know where to put this but Stan Shaw (of The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976) fame) is in this movie, and I just appreciate that. What a fun presence that guy has, even if he is annoying as hell in this movie until he too gets got.
Anyway, what a fun movie this is. It’s so 80s, so, so 80s. The things they say and do to girls are Not Great, and the film could definitely ease up on the fat-shaming though at least the kids doing that are dipshit bullies who dream of one day being a campy asshole like Dracula. Super fun movie, totally get why it’s a cult classic, and it’s a solid addition to your Halloween/Spooky Season viewing rotation.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
I don’t know – Contemporary History?
I normally would pick a better resolution for the picture, but I had to go with this one. “You know who to call when you have ghosts. But who do you call when you have monsters?” Phenomenal. Just exquisite. In Monster Squad, they make fun of horror movies that have like ten iterations with slight derivations or ridiculous plots, and I just love that they leaned into that for the marketing. Just “we’re doing Ghosbusters (1984) but with children. DEAL WITH IT.” Gold. I’m so happy they did this.
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