The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: The Monster Squad (1987), directed by Fred Dekker

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "The Monster Mash", by Bobby Pickett

     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.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - Night of the Creeps (1986), directed by Fred Dekker

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Creeping Death", by Metallica

     As I’ve mentioned far, far too many times already, the 1980s were the golden years of horror when it came to the cinema. The state of special effects and make-up advanced to such a point that you could get some pretty amazing looking stuff for relatively little cost, which coincided with a more relaxed, gore-friendly audience, but more importantly, filmmakers were able to have fun with it. Comedy and horror goes as far back as the Abbott & Costello films of course, but what I mean is that the genre had been around long enough that deconstruction and satirization of horror was possible. When people are taking the time to dig into the formula and tropes of your genre, then you know you’ve hit the big time.

     If you’ve followed my Marathon series in the past, then you might recognize the name Fred Dekker from Monster Squad, a fun little film wherein a rambunctious Goonies-style group of kids fight against Golden Age era monsters. He was also involved in the Tales From the Crypt TV show, which was good, Robocop 3, which was crap, and Star Trek: Enterprise, which was meh, so he doesn’t have the most pristine of track records. Still, to make even one good movie is a feat in and of itself, and in the 80s Dekker managed to distill his personal flair for the more comedic side of horror into three films, spread out over 1986 and ‘87: Monster Squad (which I mentioned above), House (not based on the Japanese film, unfortunately) and Night of the Creeps. As Dekker is only credited as a writer for House, I decided to take a look at the latter in order to get a more complete picture of Dekker’s creative vision. Plus it was really convenient, so yeah, it gets a spot.

     As far as plots go, Night of the Creeps follow the example of its influences by not complicating things too much. In 1959 a device containing an alien parasite crash lands on Earth. The leech-like parasite enters the human body through the mouth and lays eggs in the brain, which ultimately leaves the victim a zombie with very high head explosion potential. Hidden away in its first victim, who just so happens to be in cryogenic stasis in a science lab in the exact same college town it landed in 30 years ago, the parasites are accidentally set loose upon the unsuspecting world by students Chris and J.C. in a hazing ritual gone awry. Now it’s up to Chris and Detective Cameron (played by Tom Atkins, who also starred in oft-forgotten B-movie Halloween III:Season of the Witch) to unravel the mystery of these seemingly random deaths and eventually try and save the human race from these creeps. As James Cameron’s Aliens would say, it’s time for a bug hunt.

     Aside from the glaring plothole of how and why the parasite’s first victim has been cryogenically frozen in a college science lab, as even one of those old B-movies Dekker is homaging would have given at least a few lines about it, Night of the Creeps is a enjoyably campy, delightfully gory movie in the vein of such films as Return of the Living Dead and The Stuff. I hesitate to call it good, just as in those old movies the most enjoyment you get out of this one is in the last 20 minutes or so, but those last 30 minutes are fucking amazing. That and there’s just this ever-so-slight undercurrent of cartoonish absurdity that heightens things in just the right places. The Fallout-esque parody of the 50s at the beginning of the film, Detective Cameron’s obsession with film noir and pulp mysteries, Dekker isn’t getting as jokey here as he would be in Monster Squad but you can definitely tell his tongue has touched his cheek here. Oh, and seeing obviously fake heads getting blown up by gunfire is always a treat.

     Of the two Dekker directed films I’ve seen I have to side with Monster Squad, but Night of the Creeps was also a pretty fun. Classic ‘Movie Night With Friends’ material I think, especially if you make it a double feature with James Gunn’s Slither, which takes the basic premise of NotC and tosses in a little bit of The Thing for flavor. Just don’t scream too loudly, you probably don’t want to keep your mouth open for too long.