Hey readers, Reviewer of Steel here back with a new review. Today I’ll be starting back up one of my favorite old review segments I did, Aged Cheese. And I have found the best movie for that, the cult Halloween hit, Monster Squad!
This was a movie that has really taken off in the last year. Like it was one I had never heard about at all until last year when the Nostalgia Critic did his review of the movie and after that it felt like it was everywhere. Like the whole world had seen his review and was like “Holy cow, this thing is great to start to market again, let’s to do that!” And of course I watched it and found it the perfect thing to end off this month of reviews with.
Plot: Hundreds of years ago Abraham Van Helsing and his crew tried to take down Dracula and his dark forces but failed. Now in the 1980’s it is up to Sean and his crew of monster movie loving pre-teens to stop Dracula and all the other movie monsters from destroying the city.
This movie is amazingly stupid and the best Castalvania movie I think so many kids could ask for if you grew up with that game. Since Castalvania is basically killing Dracula and all the monster movie monsters and that is what the kids in this movie do it fits. Plus I feel that the demographic this movie was made for were fans of the game and were the right age to play it.
On the production side it looks pretty good. Some of the effects are a little cheap and cheesy but it fits in the world this movie lives in. Before all the monster stuff happens it looks about Goonies level of budget and that is all it needs. Once the monsters do come in they are all practical effects and look like great updates of the classic Universal Studio monsters in present day.
The story is really simple and feels a lot like Ghostbusters with the ending of it. I mean it is just monsters coming back and kids gotta kill’em. What gets creative is all the different ways the kids fight off the monsters. I often think back to this movies classic line “Wolfman’s got nards.” Yes the Wolfman, the werewolf has nards that you can kick to take him out. That is the level of goofy this movie gets. There is also using a crossbow to shoot the mummy’s bandages to a tree and him just unraveling or using a shot gun to blast away the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It is all entertaining stuff, but is very standard.
On the character side of things it is a very classic 80’s line-up of the cool kid, the fat kid, named Fat Kid because, the best friend, and the boring protagonist. Oh and of course the super-hot teenage next door neighbor and the annoying little sister. None of them get much development past that. There is a creepy old German guy who helps transcribe the book on how to beat the monsters once and for all who has a dark past that most younger kids would miss but is a real eye opener now. Then there are Sean’s parents who took from the Jurassic World school of having a big scary divorce and marital issue problem in the background that is somehow resolved. In the defense of this movie, it actually shows it more being resolved than it not being a thing at all in Jurassic World.
Final Thoughts: This is a movie that is just drenched in 80’s adventure kid movie goodness as well as a big love for all those spooky creatures that go bump in the night. Only it also is aware of all of the other media, kind of like Scream, just not as self-referential. Then all the answers arrived when I saw Shane Black of most notably Iron Man 3, and one of my favorite movies: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and that really answered every reason and question one could have. This is a big hodgepodge of monster movies, the Goonies, and Ghostbusters greatness.
Score: Munster Cheese
Candy&Popcorn 