The Monster Squad (1987)

Just because I was going to hit the unreasonable number of 49 werewolf movies for WOLFtober, I had to toss something in to hit an even 50. How about an 80s comedy kids horror collecting all of the classic Universal horror monsters in an evil The Avengers-esque collaboration? Sure.

It opens with Van Helsing tossing bundles of TNT at Dracula, which is perfectly true to the time period but somehow feels wrong. He has to have a girl read German at a glowing rock really fast so it will turn into an Evil Dead II spinning hurricane and suck all of the demons in, but they don't succeed.

Now in modern day, i.e. the 1980s, we meet all of the little kids in a stereotypical 80s elementary school. There are the bullies who call everyone "faggot," there's the slightly-older cool kid who wears a leather jacket and leather gloves, there's the fat kid who everyone calls "fat kid," there are the comic book nerds, there's the 5-year-old toddler sister of one of the kids, and so on. Aside from the bullies, all of the rest of the kids are in a treehouse club called The Monster Club because they… like monsters. They have a dog, too, for good measure.

Monster Club mostly consists of sitting in the treehouse and asking hypotheticals about old movie characters, like whether The Wolf Man would be able to drive a car. All I know is that WolfCop could definitely drive a car. The adults can't act worth a damn, but the adults are barely in the movie so it's ok.

The scenery is very "monster movie"; obvious props, wire animations, trap doors. But it all looks so lovingly made, and there's so much of it. A couple of pilots flying a WW2 bomber full of Transylvanian boxes over the U.S. suburbs for no particular reason run into trouble when Dracula pops out of a box. They open the bomb bay doors, dropping Dracula and all of his misfit monsters down into a suburban swamp located conveniently close to our elementary school.

I missed how Dracula got a palace with the magic gemstone in it. One of the kids bought Van Helsing's original German-language diary from the classified or something, which Dracula is going to need back. The kids can't read German, so they have to ask The Scary German Guy next door (the doctor from Lynch's Dune) to translate, which he happily does while serving pie. He translates that the amulet can only be used against evil once every 100 years, by a virgin girl, and it just so happens that is… tomorrow.

Dracula tells Frankenstein's monster to go kill the kids and get the diary. Frankenstein's monster (the zoologist from Wolfen and priest from Late Phases) stiff-legged walks over to the 5-year-old girl, and they instantly become the best of friends. The other kids are scared of him at first (Fat Kid hides in a trash can), until the dinky 5-year-old says "come on, don't be chicken shit!" in her cute little voice. The monster joins The Monster Club, and they teach him cool 80s slang like "bogus."

Uncle Rico from Napolean Dynamite runs into the police station and demands to be arrested. He tells them he's a werewolf, they don't believe him, and he becomes The Wolf Man. He's a bipedal humanoid like the original, but he has an awful fixed-expression face mask. Dracula has a silver-topped cane to poke at him, though.

Of course, it has an 80s montage of the kids in school designing monster hunting gear. The school has bullet smelting molds, because 'murica. It's just long enough to get the point. The whole movie is pretty tight, well-paced, and constantly engaging. It might have been too stupid when it came out, but now it stands up pretty well as a fun 80s time capsule. It's littered with 80s kids humor. Boobs, hehe.

They all run down to the palace to battle monsters, which is kind of a one-by-one matchup of goofy monsters to goofy weapons. Fat Kid slaps Dracula with a garlic-heavy slice of pizza. They stick a lit stick of dynamite into Wolf Man's trousers, blasting him to bits; since he's one of the invulnerable-against-all-but-silver werewolves, his bits eventually reassemble. The cool kid stakes lesser vampires, and the 5-year-old toddler fights the real Dracula with assistance from her new best pal, Frankie's monster.

They need a virgin to read the German magic spell, so they bring in one of the kids' older sisters. She reads them, they don't work, and her virginity is called into question: "well, Steve, but he doesn't count!" They have to replace her with the 5-year-old, who is the unexpected hero of the film. She makes another Evil Dead whirlpool, and all of the monsters are sucked back to wherever monsters get sucked to.