As for the other films...
Wolfman's Got Nards (2018)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
While I've seen The Monster Squad and really enjoyed it, I wouldn't call it a classic of my childhood. My introduction to horror came through the teen horror films of the late '90s like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and The Faculty, the new hotness in the genre at the time that ruled the racks of Blockbuster Video, as well as films not from the '80s, but from the '70s, most notably Carrie. My mom didn't get cable until I was almost in middle school. By the 2000s, the time when I started to get seriously interested in horror movies, the days of '80s horror flicks being played on repeat on cable networks were dying out as those networks moved on to newer films and their own original programming. In short, I just missed the days when The Monster Squad built up its cult fandom through frequent showings on HBO, so I don't have the same attachment to it the way that a lot of people just a few years older than me did.
Watching Wolfman's Got Nards, however, made me want to watch The Monster Squad again, especially given that I own it on DVD. A look back at not only the making of the film, but also its botched release and its rediscovery by a generation of '90s kids by way of airings on cable, the film boasts interviews with not only its creators Fred Dekker and Shane Black and many of its cast and crew members (most notably Andre Gower, who directed this documentary), but also the people who have been influenced by it, from Hollywood writers and directors like Seth Green, Joe Lynch, and Adam F. Goldberg to the many fans who helped The Monster Squad rise from the grave. It's an enlightening and cheerful film that I would say is a must-see for anybody who loves the film that it inspired it.
Through interviews with the creators of the film, we get plenty of behind-the-scenes info on its production, from fun anecdotes from the actors to details from the makeup artists about the special effects they employed. Specifically, one of the main influences on the film was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the seminal 1948 parody of the Universal monster movies and, ironically, probably the best film to come out of the late period of Universal's horror cycle, primarily because, while the film was a comedy, the actual monsters were still played for horror while the human protagonists served as the source and butt of the humor. In short, it was a straight-faced horror movie with a couple of funny guys dropped into the middle of it and screwing everything up, which is exactly the route that Dekker and Black wound up taking with The Monster Squad, casting the monsters with an eye towards making them scary rather than campy and even going as close to the original Universal monster designs as they could without risking a lawsuit. On the comedic side, instead of two guys from Jersey, they dropped in a cast of kids who would've been right at home in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or The Goonies and let them go wild, taking their knowledge of the monsters gleaned from late-night creature features (as well as assumptions about, say, whether a werewolf would have testicles), putting it to use, and growing as people along the way. Needless to say, if you're already a fan, you will absolutely devour this film, and even if you're not, this may yet win you over.
Given its beloved status today, it may seem odd to know how badly this movie bombed back in the '80s, but once you see how they marketed it, it will all make sense. Throughout the film, the people involved with making The Monster Squad voice their disbelief at some of the posters that were made up for this film and how they managed to get approved by both an ad agency and a major film studio, taking a horror-comedy packed with frightening imagery and selling it to audiences as a campy, family-friendly adventure. Parents who might've taken their kids to see it turned away once they noticed the PG-13 rating (or, in the UK, the 15 rating, which meant kids under 15 couldn't see it at all even with adult supervision), and critics didn't know who the hell it was for, saying that it was too corny for adults but too scary for kids. But leave it to HBO, the station that resurrected numerous '80s films from Flash Gordon to Three Amigos! to The Beastmaster, to put The Monster Squad in regular rotation and introduce it to a new generation. Over the course of the '90s and early '00s, a cult fandom slowly, but surely grew through cable TV and home video rentals of recirculated tapes from its one VHS release. Lines from the movie entered the pop culture lexicon, and people began to talk about The Monster Squad as a lost classic. By the time of the film's 20th anniversary, which saw a cast reunion screening by the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, Texas followed by (at long last) a proper DVD release, the film's fandom was primed to explode. Today, you can see its influence in the likes of Stranger Things and the remake of It, the work of the many fans who have kept it alive and introduced it to their own children and younger siblings.
The Bottom Line
Wolfman's Got Nards is a great love letter to a classic film and its fans that, in all honesty, rekindled my interest in a movie that was never really that big a part of my childhood. It works as both a backstage documentary and as a tribute to the people who have made The Monster Squad what it is today.
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Next up, an old classic that proves that horror remakes don't have to suck...
The Blob (1988)
Rated R
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Score: 4 out of 5
Scratch that. This movie doesn't just prove that horror remakes don't have to suck, but it, like The Thing and The Fly, proves that they can even outright surpass their inspirations. Sitting pretty within the upper tier of '80s monster movies, the remake of The Blob takes the premise of the 1958 classic and gives it a bigger budget and all the grotesque special effects work that had been developed over the intervening thirty years. It is everything that a B-grade creature feature should be and then some: scary, a little bit campy, packed with effects work that's as impressive as it is disgusting, and most importantly, great fun in a crowded theater.
Set in the California ski town of Arborville just before the start of the winter tourist season, The Blob opens with a military satellite crashing down to Earth just outside the town, containing within it bacteria that, after being exposed to cosmic rays, mutated into a small blob-like creature that immediately latches onto the arm of the eccentric old man who discovers it. The blob soon devours the rest of him after some local teenagers, the cheerleader Meg Penny (Shawnee Smith), the football hero Paul Taylor (Donovan Leitch), and the motorcycle-riding delinquent Brian Flagg (Kevin Dillon), bring him to the local hospital, and before long, as it continues devouring the townsfolk and adding to its ever-growing size, the military puts the town under quarantine, ostensibly in an attempt to destroy it... but as Brian soon learns, they actually want to capture the blob and weaponize it, having originally created the monster as a biowarfare experiment, and don't care if it destroys the town in the process. Soon, our heroes, together with the local sheriff, the owner of the town diner, a preacher who sees the blob as a sign of the end times, Meg's parents and little brother Kevin, and other townsfolk must band together for survival against both the all-consuming blob and a government that's not there to help.
Characters are usually not among the things that get singled out for praise in a B-grade monster movie, but this movie goes above and beyond in that respect. It wasn't afraid to kill off people who looked like they might save the day very early on, and of those who live long enough to get some development, the writing from Chuck Russell (who also directed) and Frank Darabont does plenty to flesh them out -- and where they don't, the actors do. Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith make for very likable heroes as they fight to survive, and eventually fight back, against the blob, with both of them, especially Smith's Meg, getting plenty of room to shine as they go from scared teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks to smart survivors. Even minor victims get at least a few lines to show off some interesting personality before they get killed off, whether it's Paul's obviously doomed teammate Scott who's looking forward to a hot date with his girlfriend Vicki (played by a pre-Baywatch Erika Eleniak) or Kevin's "cool" friend Eddie who drags him off to see Garden Tool Massacre at the theater. And of course, when the army comes in with hazmat suits, white tents, and black helicopters, it's up to Joe Seneca as Dr. Meadows to bring the utter shadiness as a bureaucrat who likely doesn't know what he's doing, and certainly doesn't give a damn, even when his own subordinates tell him that he ought to rethink his current course of action. This was a cast of monster movie characters that I could both love and, in some cases, love to hate.
The special effects also hold up remarkably well, making use of every visual trick that existed in the late '80s from conventional makeup to puppets to stop-motion. The blob is a big, nasty mofo that only gets bigger and nastier as the film went on, an overgrown ball of pink snot that eventually sprouts tentacles to ensnare its victims. And whereas the 1958 version was obviously limited by the Hays Code, here director Russell takes full advantage of the R rating and the inherently unreal nature of how the blob kills people (which passed the MPAA's muster far more easily than, say, Jason hacking teenagers with a machete) to showcase a multitude of horrible ways to die, the blob dissolving people's flesh while they scream in pain and terror and, in at least two instances, eating people from the inside out. It is agonizing to witness the things that happen to people that get caught by the blob, and when you pair that with the likable characters I mentioned earlier, it makes you want to see them escape that much more. The blob is a force of nature, such that, when the preacher claims that the crashed satellite that brought it to Earth was, in fact, the star Wormwood foretold in the Book of Revelation, you can very much believe it. It may be a somewhat unavoidably campy monster, but the way it is handled and portrayed fuses that with some true menace.
The Bottom Line
A near-classic that I debated whether to give a 4 or a 5 out of 5, the only thing stopping me being that I had to think about that for a second (I prefer to reserve perfect scores for films that I find unimpeachable). Even so, this is a must-see for fans of monster movies, taking an old-school B-movie premise and showing the sort of movie that might've been made back then if modern, or at least '80s, special effects existed at the time.
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