The Monster Squad

I am not entirely sure the target audience The Monster Squad.   Sure, it’s meant to be a junior-league Ghostbusters with a bunch of kids teamed up to battle monsters.  But strange inserts of foul language, and violence which included kids with guns make me think that parents would be shocked by this.  I wasn’t shocked, but obviously I was concerned.  That’s not to say that the movie has the template for these things.  They just seem to spring up without notice in a movie that looks like the kind of dopey kid-com.

It is pretty dopey.  I think that kids watching this will probably do so without their parents.  Like the Care Bears movies, it will divide families in the way that the kids will find it interesting in the way that things are moving on the screen while the parents will excuse themselves to go and find something else to do.

The movie itself is pretty stupid.  It concerns a group of kids who are failing in school because they spend all of their time drawing pictures of monsters and not paying attention.  They idolize the classic movie monsters, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy (however no love is given to the Invisible Man, probably due to the film’s low-budget).  Their principal emphatically makes it clear that monsters do no exist and that this whole interest in their kind is a complete waste of time.

It is at that exact moment that the monsters begin rising from their graves.  Well, they come through a vortex that was caused by an ancient amulet.  Anyway, Drac needs that amulet so that he and his cohorts can somehow use it to rule the world.  You can pretty well see where this is going.  The monsters try to retrieve the amulet, the kids frustrate their efforts and we get a lot of crude and violent behavior on their behalf.

I would not recommend this movie because I don’t think that parents would want their kids to see this based on the language but even if it had not foul language I wouldn’t recommend it either.  It is stupid even by kid’s standards.  If the kids are hungering for something like this, rent Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  It’s a gem, AND it includes the Invisible Man.  There love is not lost.