Best Geeky Finds – Man, You Sure Know a Lot About Monsters

Dracula… the Wolfman… the Mummy… the creature from the Black Lagoon… Frankenstein’s monster. As a fan of B-movies, a good chunk of movies I love include these creatures (both good and bad). So when I ran across a movie on Hulu I had not seen, The Monster Squad, featuring all of these characters, I knew it was something to be loved. 

In The Monster Squad (1987, PG-13), after the first failed take down of the monsters by Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula returns a century later to destroy the amulet that stopped them before. Without Van Helsing, who’s to stop this ghoulish group? The Monster Squad—a group of preteens who love horror movies and stories (being the 80s, who else would be the protagonist?). It takes Dracula infiltrating the cops using a backwards anagram of his name, and a cop being attacked by a werewolf for the group to realize something has to be done. That plan, it seems, is to break into Dracula’s lair to find the legendary amulet.

Adding to their luck however, they have a secret weapon—Frankenstein’s friendly monster who would rather be friends with Sean’s (Andre Gower) little sister Phoebe than follow its master’s bidding. In addition to the reclusive Holocaust survivor neighbor (the only person in town to know German apparently), the group finds themselves in the center of town with every monster hunting them down to retrieve the amulet while they try activating its power.

What I loved about this movie was its originality. Even as compared to current movies, few movies have incorporated multiple film properties that haven’t been part of a huge franchise such as Marvel or DC. Unlike its predecessors that had done so, like Abbott and Costello, Monster Squad did not force pre-established knowledge of the characters, nor create a long prologue to understand this story. Instead, the only things we need to know are the basic pop-culture knowledge of these horror movie staples, and even these facts are minimal.

So this weekend, after you’ve finished Stranger Things, catch Monster Squad on Hulu, along with many other horror classics.

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