Sunday, May 13, 2007
Monster Squad Vs Plan 9 From Outer Space: The 80's Teen Action Genre's relationship with Classical Hollywood
'Monster Squad' (Dir. Fred Dekker, 1987) is part of a very identifiable cycle of teen adventure (sci-fi/horror)-comedy movies of the mid - late 80s, a cycle which includes among others Adventures In Babysitting, My Best Friend Is A Vampire, My Science Project, Weird Science, Flight Of The Navigator and Space Camp. Many of these 80s Teen Action Movies are characterised by a postmodern re-visiting of Classical Hollywood and TV genres - Monster Squad's 'Dracula' is not Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the B-Movie Hammer Horror charicature. Everything is seen through a thick fog of collective popular memory, but a collective popular memory consisting not of actual historical events, but one constructed purely from a mass consumption of pop culture images we share through television, cereal packets and drive-in movies.
If Monster Squad reminded me of any other Cult Classic, it was Ed Wood's all-time 1959 Mondo Shlocko Plan 9 From Outer Space, the so called 'Worst Movie Of All Time', and perhaps the Sci-Fi /Horror B-Movie Genre's definitive statement. One key similarity bewteen the two movies is how they both draw so heavily and - crucially - so clumsily on stock Hammer Horror and Sci-Fi images, cutting and pasting together a messy collage of quotations. In Monster Squad, this effect is very much played for laughs; one memorable scene has Frankenstein's coffin rise from a swamp, amazing enough, until it is revealed that he is being held aloft by The Gill Man - as Dracula and The Wolf Man look on in triumph. It's ridiculous, and it knows it, but there's still something gleefull about the way it's done, like 'Actually, all these monsters together, it is pretty cool.'
In Plan 9's case the Monster over-kill is much less deliberate, but it's certainly still pretty funny and genuinely bizarre, not to mention the fact that it is actually cut and pasted together from different movies, even different genres. Plan 9 includes some footage origionally shot for an Ed Wood project titled Tomb Of The Vampire, which from the look and title of it would have been pretty much a straight (or as straight as Ed Wood could do it) Hammer-styled Dracula flick, starring none other than Bela Lugosi. When Lugosi died during filming, Wood decided to use what little footage he had from Tomb Of The Vampire in his next project, origionally titled Graverobbers From Outer Space, suggesting something part Stock Hammer Horror and part Stock Sci-Fi - which is exactly what it is, in the clumsiest way possible. Plan 9 features scenes of Bela Lugosi looking like he's in a completely different movie: which he is.
Another similarity between Monster Squad and Plan 9 is simply that they are both low-budget, exploitation affairs, and even though Monster Squad is much more knowing about the way it treats the genre, it's very cheapness shines winningly through - this isn't a big bucks romp a la The Goonies or even Bill & Ted's. Wether it likes it or not, Monster Squad is just as much a Trashy B-Movie as the films it lampoons. While I'm generally prepared to give Monster Squad the benefit of the doubt vis a vis it's 'ironic detachment from the subject matter' (to paraphrase Waynes World), but reviews I've looked up are incredibly varied, some say 'Spoof', others 'good family entertainment' and others simply that it's badly acted, low bugdet cheap thrills, and not in the good way, seeing no irony contained therein at all, and instead seeing just A Bad Movie. I guess this sorta mixed reaction would be comparable to the reaction to Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop, relased the same year as Monster Squad, in 1987. Robocop is read by many as a partly being a satire on Ultra-Violent 80s Action Cinema, but was understood by others - by most, I imagine, on first viewing - as simply just another dumb, bloody shoot 'em up, very much in The Terminator tradition, with a potentially fascist subtext. This failure to reach a general critical consensus about RoboCop's position (not good/bad, but simply 'where it's coming from') is mirrored in muddled critical attitudes to Monster Squad. The suggested 'ironic detachment' of these movies makes it difficult to pin them down, and their inherent cheapness only confuses matters - however satirical the intent, their own trashiness undermines the message. (The key difference bewteen RoboCop and Monster Squad, is that if his intent is ironic - which it surely is - Verhoeven has serious issues with the films he pastciches, where as Dekker clearly has huge affection for his subject matter.) Verhoeven, of course, went on to direct the very idelogically similar Starship Troopers, which you might argue is a more successful example of his particular thang than even Robocop.
Ultimately, what Plan 9 and Monster Squad share is a punk, gonzoid DIY ethic. They are films aimed directly and unashamedly at The Kids, in Wood's case a generation of newly affluent Teens, High School rock and rollers digging Elvis & Cadillac cars, living under the threat of Communism and The Bomb, and in Dekker's case a suburban generation raised on a diet of McDonalds, Marvel Comic Books, Steven King novels and late-night B-Movie Re-Runs, the generation that produced The Ramones. This generation, I guess, would become what we now call Generation X, a generation defined in part by it's bored, 'Whatever, Nevermind' ironic relationship with Mass Pop Culture, and movies like Monster Squad laid the seeds for the relitively sophisticated Slacker postmodernism of Clerks (Dir. Mike Smith, 1994) the Scream series, the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV show and the wonderful Waynes World (Dir. Penelope Spheeris, 1992). The 80s Teen Action Cinema told its' audiences that stuff like Plan 9 From Outer Space was worth celebrating, or at the very thinking about - and ultimately however exploitative, Monster Squad was an honest attempt to re-evaluate and rehabilitate a genre maligned by the critics, but loved by The Kids. A worthy cause.
(You can read my over-excited review of Monster Squad below.)
(And I just checked: Monster Squad is gonna be available on DVD from July 27th. Plan 9 is already available on DVD.)
If Monster Squad reminded me of any other Cult Classic, it was Ed Wood's all-time 1959 Mondo Shlocko Plan 9 From Outer Space, the so called 'Worst Movie Of All Time', and perhaps the Sci-Fi /Horror B-Movie Genre's definitive statement. One key similarity bewteen the two movies is how they both draw so heavily and - crucially - so clumsily on stock Hammer Horror and Sci-Fi images, cutting and pasting together a messy collage of quotations. In Monster Squad, this effect is very much played for laughs; one memorable scene has Frankenstein's coffin rise from a swamp, amazing enough, until it is revealed that he is being held aloft by The Gill Man - as Dracula and The Wolf Man look on in triumph. It's ridiculous, and it knows it, but there's still something gleefull about the way it's done, like 'Actually, all these monsters together, it is pretty cool.'
In Plan 9's case the Monster over-kill is much less deliberate, but it's certainly still pretty funny and genuinely bizarre, not to mention the fact that it is actually cut and pasted together from different movies, even different genres. Plan 9 includes some footage origionally shot for an Ed Wood project titled Tomb Of The Vampire, which from the look and title of it would have been pretty much a straight (or as straight as Ed Wood could do it) Hammer-styled Dracula flick, starring none other than Bela Lugosi. When Lugosi died during filming, Wood decided to use what little footage he had from Tomb Of The Vampire in his next project, origionally titled Graverobbers From Outer Space, suggesting something part Stock Hammer Horror and part Stock Sci-Fi - which is exactly what it is, in the clumsiest way possible. Plan 9 features scenes of Bela Lugosi looking like he's in a completely different movie: which he is.
Another similarity between Monster Squad and Plan 9 is simply that they are both low-budget, exploitation affairs, and even though Monster Squad is much more knowing about the way it treats the genre, it's very cheapness shines winningly through - this isn't a big bucks romp a la The Goonies or even Bill & Ted's. Wether it likes it or not, Monster Squad is just as much a Trashy B-Movie as the films it lampoons. While I'm generally prepared to give Monster Squad the benefit of the doubt vis a vis it's 'ironic detachment from the subject matter' (to paraphrase Waynes World), but reviews I've looked up are incredibly varied, some say 'Spoof', others 'good family entertainment' and others simply that it's badly acted, low bugdet cheap thrills, and not in the good way, seeing no irony contained therein at all, and instead seeing just A Bad Movie. I guess this sorta mixed reaction would be comparable to the reaction to Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop, relased the same year as Monster Squad, in 1987. Robocop is read by many as a partly being a satire on Ultra-Violent 80s Action Cinema, but was understood by others - by most, I imagine, on first viewing - as simply just another dumb, bloody shoot 'em up, very much in The Terminator tradition, with a potentially fascist subtext. This failure to reach a general critical consensus about RoboCop's position (not good/bad, but simply 'where it's coming from') is mirrored in muddled critical attitudes to Monster Squad. The suggested 'ironic detachment' of these movies makes it difficult to pin them down, and their inherent cheapness only confuses matters - however satirical the intent, their own trashiness undermines the message. (The key difference bewteen RoboCop and Monster Squad, is that if his intent is ironic - which it surely is - Verhoeven has serious issues with the films he pastciches, where as Dekker clearly has huge affection for his subject matter.) Verhoeven, of course, went on to direct the very idelogically similar Starship Troopers, which you might argue is a more successful example of his particular thang than even Robocop.
Ultimately, what Plan 9 and Monster Squad share is a punk, gonzoid DIY ethic. They are films aimed directly and unashamedly at The Kids, in Wood's case a generation of newly affluent Teens, High School rock and rollers digging Elvis & Cadillac cars, living under the threat of Communism and The Bomb, and in Dekker's case a suburban generation raised on a diet of McDonalds, Marvel Comic Books, Steven King novels and late-night B-Movie Re-Runs, the generation that produced The Ramones. This generation, I guess, would become what we now call Generation X, a generation defined in part by it's bored, 'Whatever, Nevermind' ironic relationship with Mass Pop Culture, and movies like Monster Squad laid the seeds for the relitively sophisticated Slacker postmodernism of Clerks (Dir. Mike Smith, 1994) the Scream series, the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV show and the wonderful Waynes World (Dir. Penelope Spheeris, 1992). The 80s Teen Action Cinema told its' audiences that stuff like Plan 9 From Outer Space was worth celebrating, or at the very thinking about - and ultimately however exploitative, Monster Squad was an honest attempt to re-evaluate and rehabilitate a genre maligned by the critics, but loved by The Kids. A worthy cause.
(You can read my over-excited review of Monster Squad below.)
(And I just checked: Monster Squad is gonna be available on DVD from July 27th. Plan 9 is already available on DVD.)
Labels: Cult Cinema
¶ 8:55 AM
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Cheers, guys. This was a pretty esoteric post, so it's great to know people are reading and enjoying.
Catching 'Monster Squad' on Sunday afternoon was a stroke of luck, but - crucially - a stroke of luck precipitated by a key element of 'Monster Squads' brilliance: its name. Like the B-Movies it references, 'Monster Squad' does everything it can to grab the attention of The Teenager - including an irresistable, stoopid, blunt, gonzo-ish name that SOUNDS LIKE THE NAME OF A REALLY COOL FILM. Just like Ed Wood figured you'ld watch his film if he called it 'Plan 9 From Outta Space', so the makers of 'Monster Squad' figured that nobody with an ounce of desire for cheap teen kicks could resist a title like that - which is exactly why I gave it a shot (not knowing anything about it) whilst flicking around on Sunday.
Anyway, I'm sure to return to the subject of '80s Teen Action Cinema'. I think there's alot to be said about it, and remains relively untouched by film crit.
Catching 'Monster Squad' on Sunday afternoon was a stroke of luck, but - crucially - a stroke of luck precipitated by a key element of 'Monster Squads' brilliance: its name. Like the B-Movies it references, 'Monster Squad' does everything it can to grab the attention of The Teenager - including an irresistable, stoopid, blunt, gonzo-ish name that SOUNDS LIKE THE NAME OF A REALLY COOL FILM. Just like Ed Wood figured you'ld watch his film if he called it 'Plan 9 From Outta Space', so the makers of 'Monster Squad' figured that nobody with an ounce of desire for cheap teen kicks could resist a title like that - which is exactly why I gave it a shot (not knowing anything about it) whilst flicking around on Sunday.
Anyway, I'm sure to return to the subject of '80s Teen Action Cinema'. I think there's alot to be said about it, and remains relively untouched by film crit.
80s teen action cinema: YES! further posts on such cult classics would be fab!
BTW have linked to Norm's poll asking for FIVE (and only five) top Beatles tracks. That'll break your head apart for sure - its doing my head in completely!
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BTW have linked to Norm's poll asking for FIVE (and only five) top Beatles tracks. That'll break your head apart for sure - its doing my head in completely!
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