Recently I was chatting away on Twitter and got on to the subject of the 80s movie, The Monster Squad, a movie that I loved when I first saw it back in 1987.

Surprisingly this brilliant jump back to the 80s isn’t available on DVD or Blu-ray here in the UK! I know, shocking isn’t it.

The Monster Squad sees a group of kids attempting to save the world from some of the classic monsters from movie history, Dracula (Duncan Regehr), The Mummy (Micahel Ried MacKay), The Wolfman (Carl Thibault), Frankenstein’s Monster (Tom Noonan) and Gillman (Tom Woodruff Jr.), they can only save the world from Dracula’s attempt to take over it by finding a virgin!

The Monster Squad is a movie that may be over 30 years old, damn I feel old now, but it still a brilliant watch, the makeup effects from Stan Winston Studios are amazing and even in today’s standard of overdosing with CGI, the movie has that feeling of realism.

The script from Fred Dekker and Shane Black is also something is directed on to the screen with pure style by Fred Dekker, the comedic elements still work now and I still find myself laughing loudly at many of the moments that the kids come out with some great one-liners.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”‘Wolfman’s got nards!’ – Horace, #TheMonsterSquad” quote=”Horace: Wolfman’s got nards!”]

OK, the movie may be over 30 years old, but it is a movie that I recommend everyone to see, it is a real 80s classic movie and in this day and age, it’s still hard to believe that the movie has 15 certificate, but I dare say that will down to some rather gruesome visual effects, particularly the moment when the Wolfman gets split up!

The makeup for the monsters in The Monster Squad are fantastic, as I mentioned earlier they were created by Stan Winston Studios and the realism is second to none, the Wolfman looks very real, look out for the scene when he is changing from his human form to the wolf, it’s so nicely done, not as scary as An American Werewolf, but it will still put chills on the back of your neck.

Let’s not forget Gillman, aka the creature from the black lagoon, again the prosthetics and the suit are just visually brilliant, The Mummy is also quite a scary looking character, Frankenstein’s Monster just melts your heart, no really he does, played by Tom Noonan (Manhunter, Last Action Hero), the creature certainly brings some softer moments to the comic horror of the movie.

Last, but no means least, is Dracula played by Duncan Regehr (V, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Regehr is a brilliant Dracula, he’s both evil and rather charming at the same time, probably one of my favourite portrayals of the Vampire Count, he certainly has the screen presence that brings his character back from the dead.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”‘He always returns from the grave. If they blew him up, put his head in a blender and mailed the rest of him to Norway, he would still return from the grave!’ – Det. Del Crenshaw – #TheMonsterSquad” quote=”Det. Del Crenshaw: ‘He always returns from the grave. If they blew him up, put his head in a blender and mailed the rest of him to Norway, he would still return from the grave!'”]

The kids in the movie are all brilliantly played by a great cast, they do remind me of The Goonies, so I suppose you could say that The Moster Squad is much like The Goonies meets the Universal Monsters, but that’s not a bad thing, the kids are funny with there lines, perfectly scripted to bring their characters to life as they try to defend their town and the world from the Monsters.

One character that stood out to me when I first saw The Monster Squad back in the 80s was the “Scary German Guy” played by Leonardo Cimino (Dune, Waterworld, V), the character was a concentration camp survivor that, at first, you weren’t sure where his character would lead to in the film. The character is played with a true feeling of the part by Cimino and he is certainly a key part of The Monster Squad’s success of being an 80s fan favourite.

The Monster Squad is a great homage to those Universal Monsters that I used to watch on BBC2 when they used to show the classic black and white movies, it’s also a fun and exciting movie that, even by today’s standards, still holds my attention from start to finish, this is a movie that deserves to be seen.

The Monster Squad is currently available on Sky Cinema, so if you have Sky, then I highly recommend you check it out.