Looking for a frightening film that’s fun for the whole family? Watch Monster Squad and you’ll have a blast. Directed by Fred Dekker (Night of the Creeps) and written by Dekker and Shane Black (Lethal Weapons, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) Monster Squad is freaky fun for all ages. Just think of it as The Goonies but with classic monsters. Actually, I’d say this is a better film than The Goonies. I watched it last Halloween and it brought me right back to my childhood. The Monster Squad is a lost cult classic that more people need to see.

The Monster Squad is about a pre-teen club that loves everything monsters. They have meetings in the coolest treehouse you’ve ever seen and their ranks include; Sean: the born leader, Patrick: Sean’s loyal skateboarding best friend, Eugene: naive and the youngest member, Rudy: a badass in a leather jacket that smokes, and Fat Kid… Yes they call him Fat Kid and yes, he’s awesome. There’s also Sean’s annoying little sister Phoebe who begs Sean to let her in the club. So what happens when that club is put to the test? Yes, by some bizarre twist of fate; Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Frankenstein’s Monster are all brought together. What do they want? World domination! I know it sounds stupid, but Dekker and Black somehow manage to sell us on the premise with a sharp script and plenty of monstrously big laughs.

The tone is comedic but not dumbed down to a kid’s level. As a matter of fact, the film is rated PG-13 and even that’s pushed. You got kids firing shotguns, kids blowing up werewolves, and even the Wolf Man getting kicked in the nards. It’s got the action and the horror but it’s also got the heart. Sean’s sister Phoebe forms a friendship with the misunderstood Frankenstein’s monster. Not to mention the kids form a friendship with an old man they refer to as “The Creep German Guy” who helps the children against Dracula’s diabolical scheme. It’s a little bit of everything and it holds up surprisingly well. The sets are beautifully drenched in fog with lightning constantly a crackle. It’s a well made film that’s both entertaining and memorable. The only problem is not enough people have seen it.

I’m not surprised The Monster Squad still operates on a small cult level. None of the stars have gone to any big success with maybe the exception of the Wolf Man (Tom Gries aka Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite.) I’ve also seen Frankenstein’s Monster (Tom Noonan) on a handful of TV shows. So possibly it’s the combination of no big names and a weird premise that kept the film from being a hit. It’s a shame when you look at a similar film like Goonies and see how huge that movie was. So if you haven’t seen The Monster Squad, or haven’t seen it since you were a kid then do so. You wont regret it… Or else.

P.S. Here’s Fat Kid’s finest hour.

Sigh… If only I’d been born earlier.

I read about The Gate for the first time in an issue of “Horrorhound Magazine”. It was in a feature about PG horror movies. Ya know, stuff the whole family can enjoy. So I thought it would be an interesting departure to turn down the gore and explore the fears of a child. What I found was a movie that played out like an episode of Goosebumps. Mildly creative, and good for wimpy kids, but ultimately lacking conceptually. There’s not much to the story and the film feels restrained by it’s rating. Let me proceed by opening The Gate.

The Gate stars a young Stephen Dorff (weird right?) in his feature film debut as Glen, a curious pre-teen boy in typical suburbia. After a tree is taken down in Glen’s backyard, Glen finds a geode. So Glen and his friend Terry start digging a hole in search of more. Later, Glen and Terry crack open the geode and find a strange note with written incantations. The two read the incantations aloud while a very 80s party is being thrown downstairs by Glen’s sister and boom! A mysterious force answers by levitating Glen. Terry does a little research and comes to the conclusion that the hole is a gateway to the domain of evil gods. Somehow he is absolutely correct and bizarre events continue to take place.

The film builds up to a finale in the hole where Glen discover a race of small demon-like monsters. The monsters provide some wee scares but we don’t get enough of them. There’s a lot that I feel like I’m not getting in The Gate. The whole film is always building to unimpressive set pieces. You want something really cool to happen but then you get something like levitation, or moths, or a vision of some sad kid’s parents. I couldn’t be less interested in The Gate’s attempt at spectacle. Really, I only continued to watch to see the monsters.

Monsters aside I was impressed by the young Stephen Dorff. He was a talented child actor that somehow blossomed into an underwhelming adult actor. The other characters are fairly stock but competently acted as well. The Gate is well put together from a production standpoint it just lacks in the story department. Would I recommend this to a family looking for a good fright? Nah, you’d be better off watching or reading Goosebumps. Might I recommend “The Girl Who Cried Monster”? It’s bone-chilling!

Future star of Space Truckers Stephen Dorff.

You only need two words to describe why The Stepfather is a great thriller and they are “Terry” and “O’Quinn”. Terry O’Quinn stars in his breakout role as Henry Morrison/Jerry Blake, a chameleon-like murderer in search of the perfect family. One minute he’ll be stressing the importance of family values, the next he’ll be engaging in disturbing acts of extreme violence. It’s a terrifying concept built around an iconic horror bad guy performance. Also, as a Washingtonian I can’t resist the film’s Bellevue-Seattle setting. I find the Pacific Northwest always adds just the perfect hint of atmosphere to a good frightening flick.

Henry Morrison has just murdered his family. Why? They weren’t quite to his liking. So he boards a fairy and looks for a new locale to start afresh. Henry changes his name to Jerry Blake and becomes a real estate agent. He marries a former widow Susan Maine (Shelley Hack) in an attempt to have a loving family. Unfortunately for Jerry, Susan has a suspicious daughter Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). This leads to Henry/Jerry’s past being unraveled and of course, he ain’t too happy. What follows is the typical “No one believes me that this man is a killer!” shtick in fairly typical fashion. Except that the killer is your stepdad who builds birdhouses! Ooh!

This film could have easily been forgotten with a lesser actor in the lead role. Luckily, Terry O’Quinn is the perfect middle-aged mad man. Still there’s a hint of sadness to the role. All Henry/Jerry really wants is to capture the spirit of the american dream. He just doesn’t know how to get it without violence. You can probably guess things don’t work out for the daddio. Still the film somehow received two sequels, O’Quinn only returning for the second film, and a remake in 2009 with Dylan Walsh. But stick to the original Stepfather, it’ll raise ya right.

Fear the Beard!

I’ve always had mixed feelings about writer/director Stuart Gordon. He wrote and directed the cult-classic Re-Animator and also developed the story for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Then again, he also made the embarrassingly cheesy Robot Jox and the just plain bad Space Truckers. So a lot was weighing on my first viewing of From Beyond. Is Stuart Gordon talented or just lucky? Maybe he was a master of horror who simply lost his way in later years? It’s certainly not uncommon for any director to go downhill overtime. So now that I’ve seen From Beyond I can give you a definitive answer. As much as I admire Gordon’s gross-out effects and infatuation with H.P. Lovecraft, he’s not for me.

From Beyond, like many of Gordon’s films is an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story. Though Gordon’s adaptations are about as accurate as Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe films. Gordon’s films are more notable for their grotesqueness than psychological exploration. From Beyond is the story of Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel) and his assistant Dr. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) on the brink of perfecting a device called “The Resonator”. This device when finished will have the ability to let people see beyond the the range of perceptible reality (just go with it). Eventually, Crawford gets the device ready and shows it to the hairy-chested Dr. Pretorious. Enthralled by it’s power, Pretorious becomes one with a new plane of reality. Oh, and whenever this new level of reality opens there’s a bunch of scary flying worm monsters. So Pretorious becomes one of these monstrous-like creatures and enters the other plane of reality. Crawford tries to stop Pretorious by turning off the Resonator, but not without sustaining some severe psychical and mental injuries first.

Crawford is committed to a mental hospital. Here he is treated by the beautiful Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton). Katherine then discovers that Crawford’s pineal glans have grown significantly. This biological oddity leads to Katherine’s search for the truth. So Katherine has Crawford released and along with a detective named Bubba (Ken “Kenan’s Dad” Foree”) goes back to the house where the experiments were held. At the house we watch as the characters delve deeper and deeper into the power of the Resonator. They become hypnotized by the device, turning it on again and again. Each time unleashing the alternate plane accompanied by a more mutated version of Dr. Pretorious. So it becomes a visceral battle on alternate planes of reality. I just wish it was as cool as it sounded.

The makeup effects in all the different reality sequences are fantastically disgusting. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much else here for me to sink my fangs into. I like star Jeffrey Combs who also starred in Re-Animator. He’s always had a kind of naivety to his characters that’s easy to sympathize with. Pretorious is definitely creepy but his character is never properly setup. We barely get to see him before he turns into a monster and yet everyone is always talking about him like he’s the most important piece of the whole film. He’s a poorly developed villain that doesn’t do any more than add a few gross-out scares. All in all, it’s like a David Cronenberg Body-horror movie but dumbed down. Stuart Gordon clearly has an eye for spectacle, but I think some of his stories need some re-animating.

Aw, here it goes!

The first time I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 I was disappointed. Its predecessor ranks among my top five favorite horror films of all time. It was a disturbing and inventive piece of independent filmmaking. TCM 2 is an off-the-wall dark comedy. Not really what you would expect in a followup. Especially when you have the same creative team returning. Now that I’ve watched it again I’ve softened up a little to this pulpy mess. No, it’s not as scary or as memorable as the first, but it has a deranged humor to it that’s strangely compelling. The performances are energetic, the sequences are over-the-top, and the blood is pumping.

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