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The world of cinema loves to pretend that childhood is a much better experience than it typically is. If you’re abused by your legal guardians, then it must mean that you’re a wizard just waiting to go to magic school. If you’re on a shitty sports team, then you’re destined to beat the best team in the league thanks to help of the badass rebel kid/girl who is good at sports and your coach, who was originally down on his luck but turns his life around by the end of the movie. No matter if you’re overweight, a different gender or ethnicity, disabled, the world of cinema would have us believe that there was a group of like-minded children just waiting to be your friends and go on awesome life-changing adventures with you. Maybe you’d get to be popular by the end of it, or get your first kiss from a girl by the end of it, but that world hinted at in these films. It was all a dirty, filthy, lie of course, but it was those worlds and those lives that we wished were our own, ones that we lived through vicariously whenever we watched those movies. Kinda like Being John Malkovich, but with the Bad News Bears instead.
The Monster Squad is one such example of the ‘kids adventure’ genre, or to be more accurate ‘Goonies but with monsters’. The film follows the titular Monster Squad, a gaggle of kids (including a fat loser kid and the leather jacket wearing middle school badass) who are brought together due to their mutual love of monster trivia. The common belief is that monsters aren’t real, but when the lead kid comes across the journal of Abraham van Helsing himself, which details the ritual through which darkness can rule the world, said belief is shattered when Count Dracula himself (along with a literal squad of monsters) arrives in Small Town U.S.A. hellbent on getting the journal for his own nefarious plans. It’s Monster Squad vs. Monster Squad in The Monster Squad, the only movie that dares to claim an 8 year old boy is a fair fight for a centuries old creature of darkness.
If you’ve already seen The Goonies, The Sandlot and Stand By Me, then you’ve already seen the pinnacle of ‘kids adventure’, and The Monster Squad might seem a bit redundant by comparison. The monster costumes are great though, and there’s a lot more violence in this movie than you’d see in the others, which is a definite plus. If you’ve got a weakness for these kinds of movies, or if you’re a parent looking for movies to show your kid on Halloween that aren’t too scary, then this one might be for you. Keep in mind that is a bit of salty language though, in case you have a problem with that sort of thing.
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