by Chris Vegvary
For the life of me, I just can’t understand what the appeal
is for the people in Hollywood who have decided that every movie under the sun
needs to be remade. Not just the old films, or the classics, but even the newer
films that have no need of it. For instance, when the Twilight film series ended, dollar signs were still in the eyes of
the people in charge, and they had a nice, long discussion about remaking the
series. Already. It’s kind of disgusting when you think about it, the way they
disrespect all these older movies by taking them, rewriting them, and slapping
the label of a “reboot” on them, essentially saying that the original wasn’t
good enough, and that they want to see their version of what the events should
have been.
Some movies, of course, deserve to be remade. But I ask you,
people, do we need a remake or a “reboot” of the film Monster Squad? The 1987 film featured a variety of classic
Universal monsters led by Dracula, who is looking for an amulet that Van
Helsing once used to try and send him to Limbo. A group of local kids, who call
themselves “The Monster Squad” due to their love of all things horror-related,
discover Dracula’s plan and attempt to stop him with the help of an old German
man who lives in the neighborhood.
The movie is a classic, and it is a fondly remembered part
of my childhood. I am personally not into the classic black-and-white films of
old featuring the classic movie monsters featured in the film Monster Squad, but the way they were
represented in the movie made them more modern and likeable. For example, the
character who turns into the wolfman very much wants to have nothing to do
with Dracula and his crew. In his human form, he knows he turns into a
werewolf, and he wants to be locked up or killed so he can’t hurt anyone. When
he turns into a wolfman, he pretty much does Dracula’s bidding as an
unstoppable killing machine, even being blown apart with a grenade and then
reconnecting all the pieces of his body, because apparently a werewolf can ONLY
be killed by a silver bullet. Priceless.
But these monsters are not all bad. Dracula has a cadre of
villains to follow him, including a wolfman, a gillman (reminiscent of the
Creature From the Black Lagoon), a mummy, and the Frankenstein monster. Out of
all these movie monsters, the only one who seems to be genuinely good is Frankenstein,
as he resists Dracula’s plan from the beginning, though he is pretty
feeble-minded due to being a walking corpse sewn together with the parts of
other dead people. Not to mention that he’d been asleep for at least a couple
hundred years before Dracula woke him up.
So I ask you, world: do we need a remake of Monster Squad? I couldn’t say for sure,
but I would think not. A more modern version might be nice, with more recent
horror movie villains filling in for the classic versions. It’ll never happen
because it would be a licensing nightmare, but just imagine for a moment, if
you would, a film featuring Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers,
Chucky, Pinhead, Pumpkinhead, Candyman, the Creeper (from Jeepers Creepers), Leatherface, and The Tall Man (from Phantasm) all together in one movie,
Freddy being the ringleader in the same way Dracula was in the original, and
the Monster Squad facing off against them. While it would have to be rated R in
order to get the full effect of all these awesome characters, that would be a
movie we could all look forward to.
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