Monster Squad: The Review Oh, man. Did anybody see my new fave movie 'Monster Squad' (1987) on Channel 5 this afternoon? It was der greatest. The Monster Squad is like this buncha punk kids raised on Steven King novels and trashy comics and popcorn cinema who battle B-Movie Monsters like Dracula and The Mummy and - coolest of all - The Wolfman in mid 80s Nowheresville USA suburbia, they're sorta like The BMX Bandits but with less BMX's, or a junior Ghostbusters, or a budget Goonies, or a slightly friendlier Lost Boys, and there's one kid whose menna be a bad ass, 'cos he wears a leather jacket and smokes and wears fingerless gloves and has A Bad Attitude, and a geeky kid, a Fat Kid and The Leader,and they say stuff like 'Radical' and 'Bitchin', and the special effects are hella lame and I'm pretty sure it was A Spoof, only 'cos they don't have the skill or the money or the talent to actually pull off a classy job you can never really tell what Sucks Knowlingly, and what just SUCKS, (the latter being way more fun) and there's The Cute Little Sister who - dig this - befriends Frankenstein's Monster, and the film pretty much ends with Frankenstein being sucked into a vortex and Cute Girl screaming "Come back, Frankenstein! Come baaaaccck!", like it's the touching story of the friendship between A 7 year old Girl and A Reanimated Corpse Sown Together From Human Flesh, and the National Guard turn up and demand to know 'What The Hell Has Been Going On Here', and THEN, - get this- the last 5 minutes of the movie is literally just the music video (a compilation of random clips from the movie we've just watched) for the 'Monster Squad' Theme Song, (OH YES!) which was pretty much just Ray Parker Jr's 'Ghostbusters' theme but only REALLY CRAP. They just shamelessly stuck an advert at the end of the movie! I dug it the most.

Basically, the whole thing couldn't be more 80's if it featured an innapropriate hard-drugs sub-plot and Billy Idol. Somewhere in the darkest corners of my memory I think I remember seeing it advertised in the local video store when I was just a kid (I'm talking 10 or 11) and thinking that it looked THE COOLEST. I was right. I'm staking my claim on 'Monster Squad' as A Genuine Cult Movie, a movie so dated, so badly executed and so cheap looking that it has been completely and understandably ignored by everyone, ever. But also a movie which features many things (50s B-Movie references, kids wearing 'Steven King Rules' t-shirts, a Fat Kid who winds up taking out The Gill Man with a huge shotgun and a super-quoteable script, proper Laugh Out Loud moments plus bags of general mid 80s teenage exploitation fun) which scream CULT!

Labels: Cult Cinema

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