The Monster Squad

Starring: Andre Gower, Robby Kiger, & Duncan Regehr

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Back in the late 80s, Sean (Andre Gower) and his friends were middle school kids with a fascination for monsters. Their love of old fashioned Horror ran so deep that they started a club in their tree house, calling themselves, The Monster Squad. Everything is just child's play until one day, real monsters start showing up in their small New England town, and it's up to the Monster Squad to stop them. When this film came out, not many people took notice of it, it wasn't until Lionsgate bought the rights and re-issued it. that Monster Squad became somewhat of a cult classic. This film is pure 80s, a time when kids were actually played by kids. Today, we're so afraid of traumatizing these kids, that we have 16-19 year old teens playing much younger kids. Back in the 80s, when the part called for a kid, they found a kid, and being that this was the first film for the vast majority of them, the amount of energy and excitement they brought to the film really kept it going, in what is otherwise a ridiculous story. The actors were the age of the characters they were playing and when they cursed or talked about adult themes, I found it hilarious, it was so much better because it was real. The story isn't anything to write home about, just a bunch of cheesy lines and bad special effects, and I'm sure you could figure out what's going to happen from the description on the box, but to me the best part of the film is the realism given by the cast in a movie that was anything but real. The dynamic between brother and sister, the kids who actually did something imaginative, instead of just playing video games all day. It isn't until you see a film like this that you realize just how much family films have changed. This would be a great film for kids to watch, but if it came out today, the kids would be played by college students and it would get an R rating for some of the language. In the 80s, this would have been the textbook definition of a family film, by today's standard's, it's rating has been upgraded to PG-13 and it's filed under Horror. The more things change, the more they stay the same, what was unacceptable in the 60s and family friendly in the 80s, is now not suitable for children under 13, a sign of the paranoia of the times we live in.