So what did you all think of Van Helsing? Yeah, me too. *sigh* I liked it. I think. Like may be the wrong word -- but I did enjoy it myself because I’ve got a soft spot for all the old Universal monsters. Not all their films are great, either, but the characters are so engrained into my psyche that these guys are all like uncles to me.

So since all the sensory overload of Van Helsing still hasn’t completely registered one single iota in my brain, not allowing me to make a cognitive thought on that movie -- yet (and heaven help me when it does), I will instead hearken back to my formative years to a kinder, gentler tribute to my favorite uncles — Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, called The Monster Squad.

Now there might me some of you, like me, who remember a short-lived TV show from the ’70s of that name starring a pre-Love Boat Fred Grandy. Gopher, sorry, Grandy was a computer whiz who accidentally brings to life the wax displays of our favorite monsters and together they fought crime. (Man, I’d love to have been sitting in on that TV sales pitch.)

But today we’re talking about the other Monster Squad. The one that came out in 1987. You remember: The one with the preview where the little kid questions the Wolfman’s anatomy before kicking him in the groinal area to make his escape; the scary German guy; using garlic pizza to stave off Dracula and a truly hilarious climax that calls for a virgin to say the world-saving incantation only to find out the virgin in question isn’t a virgin at all because some guy “didn’t count.”

How did we get to that point? Well, a bizarre rash of crimes is plaguing a certain police detective (Stephen Macht); a mummy is missing from the local museum; there’s a couple of shipping crates, postmarked Transylvania, that “disappeared” off an air-transport; and there’s some frothing lunatic, claiming to be a werewolf, who’s shot while trying to turn himself in but whose body disappeared while being transported to the morgue.

This detective blames it on the full moon and the usual lunacy it brings, but his son, Sean (Andrew Gower), knows better. Sean and his buddies are members of a monster appreciation society. His mom gives him a book auctioned off at an old estate that was written by some guy named Van Helsing (that's the guy who fought Godzilla mom thought when she bought it), and now some guy named Alucard is wanting to buy it back.

It seems there is an amulet that, with the aforementioned incantation, can open a vortex into limbo that will suck all the monsters off the planet, making the world safe for democracy. Mr. Alucard — a/k/a Dracula  — reunites all the monsters to retrieve the book and the amulet (that’s hidden in that old estate) to prevent this from happening. (Van Helsing himself botched an attempt at this during the pre-credit sequence.)

Sean manages to convince his friends, Patrick (Robby Kiger), Fat Kid (Brent Chalen), Eugene (Michael Faustino) and newest member Rudy (Ryan Lambert), that the monsters are real, and with the help of the “scary German guy” (Leonardo Cimino) manages to translate Van Helsing’s diary. Preparations are made, silver silverware is pilfered for bullets, wooden stakes are made ready and an urgent message, in crayon, is sent off to the army for help. Their biggest obstacle is convincing Patrick's older sister, the alleged virgin, into helping them. (She's finally blackmailed into it because Rudy took some pictures of her stripping from their club house.)

But it’s Sean's little sister, Phoebe (Ashely Bank), who steals the movie and saves their collective hash. She’s the one who befriends Frankenstein’s monster, gets him to switch sides and bails them all out in the end by taking up the incantation.

I know it sounds lame, and on paper it looks even more lame, but give the film a chance. Its heart is definitely in the right spot, but its mind is a little left of center, making it fun for all ages.

It was directed by Fred Dekker, who a year earlier gave us another cult classic with Night of the Creeps and with Monster Squad seemed destined for great things until he inexplicably slammed into a wall with Robocop 3. Dekker co-scripted the film with Shane Black, most famous for scripting all four Lethal Weapon films. (Wait a second. Written by Black and Dekker?)

All the young actors do a credible job with their roles, acting like real kids and, luckily for us, no attempt was made to cuten things up. This isn’t a spoof; it’s a homage or it would smell like bad frumage. (That’s cheese.)

So how do the monsters come off? Great! And without one single instance of CGI! Credit goes to Ben Edlund and Stan Winston for the effects and creature designs. They had to tweak them a little bit since Universal rabidly guards those particular trademarks, but we know who we’re looking at. Duncan Rehger makes a menacing Dracula, Tom Noonan a monster to be pitied and the Gill-man has never looked better.

And good luck getting the song "Rock Until You Drop" out of your head after it's pounded into your brain during the preparation phase of the film. It was penned and performed by Michael Sembello, the same guy who tweaked his song "Maniac", originally dedicated to William Lustig's infamous serial killer, and made it an anthem for Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. 

Yeah, that's The Monster Squad in a nutshell. I wanted to do a full review but a tour of every major rental outlet in the tri-cities, encompassing about 110 miles of travel turned up nothing. The Monster Squad had disappeared off the rental shelves completely, gone on to VHS nirvana, another victim of the great “make room for more DVD purge.”

*sigh*

Van Helsing really gave me the urge to watch this movie again, but I couldn’t. That’s right. You’ve let me down again, Grand Island. Shame on all of you. The film is not available to buy, in any format, but I still recommend trying to track it down. And would someone, anyone, get this thing (and Night of the Creeps) out on DVD!