1980s Horror Comedy Deserves An Entire Franchise, Stream Without Netflix

In a just world, Gen-X/Millenials would have as much nostalgia for this movie as, say, Labyrinth—maybe even more! Labyrinth was cool and all, but did it have an extended conversation about why the Wolfman wears pants? I don’t think so.

God, I love this movie. And you can, too—no subscriptions needed! It’s streaming for free right now on Pluto TV.

For those unfamiliar with The Monster Squad, let me break it down for you. A hundred years before the movie starts Dr. Van Helsing and a small group of “freedom fighters” attempt to rid the world of evil once and for all. As the movie’s opening text explains, “they blew it.”

Cut to the modern day (1987) where Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Wolfman, and The Creature from the Bla—oh sorry, I mean “Gill-man”—are trying to find a sacred amulet that is the only thing stopping them from taking over the world.

Who will stop these vile creatures? Enter The Monster Squad: a pre-teen club of misfits obsessed with classic horror movies.

With the help of an old German Holocaust survivor and Van Helsing’s journal, The Monster Squad uses stakes, silver bullets, and even dynamite to fight against Dracula and his minions.

If you ever wanted to put The Goonies and The Lost Boys in a blender, this is what would come out. A big frothy cup of wise-cracking adolescents and excellent ’80s make-up effects. But what else would you expect from Shane Black?

That’s right, the movie that proved once and for all that “Wolfman’s got nards!” was written by the same guy who wrote Lethal Weapon. Add Night of the Creeps director Fred Dekker at the helm, and you’ve got yourself a movie that should have been a blockbuster.

Instead, The Monster Squad earned a disappointing $3.8 million during its theatrical run, only a fraction of its $14 million budget.

So what went wrong? It’s possible that the movie’s PG-13 rating played a big part in its failure.

Back in the day, PG-13 wasn’t seen as the de-facto family movie rating that it is now. Parents of kids the same age as the ones in the movie were leery of bringing their little ones to a movie that was only one step below R.

Older teens, on the other hand, were too busy sneaking into The Lost Boys, which had opened two weeks prior, to bother with The Monster Squad. It also didn’t help that the inclusion of such old-fashioned monsters made a lot of people assume the film was a low-budget B-movie.

After all, what business did the Wolfman have showing up in the decade of Freddy and Jason?

Critics also didn’t love The Monster Squad, with one alleging that the movie’s target audience was “sadists in the 12-to-14-year-old age group.” To be fair, the movie did push that PG-13 rating to its breaking point in terms of violence and language.

The above mentioned dynamite appears in a scene where it’s shoved down the Wolfman’s pants and causes the creature to explode in several gory pieces.

GFR SCORE

However, to an eight- or nine-year-old, that was part of the movie’s appeal. It was the perfect bridge between something slightly less scary like Gremlins and something a bit scarier like A Nightmare on Elm Street. Call it the Baby Bear of horror comedies.

If you haven’t seen The Monster Squad, it’s not too late to join the Monster Club. All you have to do is mosey on over to Pluto TV and stream that baby for free. If you’ve got the nards that is…