When I finally did watch it, I felt exactly how I knew would, which was, "Man, if I knew of this movie when I was a kid, I would have loved it." While I still love them to this day, as you should know if you've been with me for a while, I was a real sucker for the classic Universal monsters when I was a really young kid, as they were the faces of Halloween, and this time of the year in general, for me. In fact, I would say I was a lot like the main character of Sean in how much I loved monsters in general, though I don't know if I was as hardcore as him (I didn't get around to seeing slasher movies, as he clearly had by that point, until I was in my very early teens). So, a movie about kids going up against those guys would have been right up my alley, and as a result, finally seeing The Monster Squad at 23 was a rather bittersweet experience. I still enjoy it as a nice little movie but it's frustrating because I know just how much young Cody would have completely devoured it. Looking at it as an adult, while it is well-made, entertaining, and, most importantly, has a lot of heart, it's also very simple in regards to the characters and the story (it's only 82 minutes long, and that's with the ending credits). Since it's kids against the classic monsters, you shouldn't expect anything really profound, but I feel like they could have done a little more with it, especially in regards to certain relationships because, I have to be honest, the moments where it tries to pull on your heartstrings don't completely do it for me.
In the late 1800's, in Transylvania, Abraham Van Helsing leads a posse that storms Count Dracula's castle in an attempt to rid the world of his evil through a ritual involving a mysterious amulet. However, things quickly go down the tubes and their attempt to destroy the vampire fails. A hundred years later, in modern day Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 12-year old Sean is a monster fanatic and the leader of a club devoted to them. After allowing Rudy, a mysterious, punkish junior high student to join the club, Sean is ecstatic when his mother gives him an old book that was found at an abandoned, old house in town, as it turns out to be Van Helsing's diary; unfortunately, it's written in German. Meanwhile, Dracula himself arrives in town after he takes a crate containing the Frankenstein monster from a B-25 in mid-flight. At the same time, Sean's father, police detective Del Crenshaw, gets a call from the station and overhears a man there pleading with the officers to lock him up, claiming he's a werewolf. The man is shot dead when he becomes violent and shoots up the station's ceiling, but on the way to the morgue, he resurrects, transforms into a werewolf, kills the van's driver, and escapes. Later, Del and his partner, Detective Rich Shapir, respond to a report of an ancient Egyptian mummy disappearing from a local museum. Little do they know that Dracula is amassing an army of monsters, which also includes the Gill-Man and the Frankenstein monster, whom he revives with lightning. Overhearing his dad talk about the strange happenings, and seeing a message about someone named "Mr. Alucard" having called for him, Sean calls a club meeting and tells them that he believes there are real monsters around. Dubbing them the "Monster Squad," he tells them that they're only ones who are savvy enough about it to stop them. Feeling that the key is Van Helsing's diary, Sean and two of his friends, Horace and Patrick, visit a man they call "Scary German Guy," who lives in a creepy-looking house. However, he turns out to be a kindly old man, who tells them the diary speaks of an amulet that's formed from concentrated good but, once every hundred years, when good and evil become perfectly balanced, the amulet is vulnerable to destruction. If it is destroyed, the world will be plunged into darkness, which Dracula means to do, having found it in the house where Van Helsing's disciples also hid the diary. The diary also describes a ritual to open a hole in Limbo, through the combination of the amulet, an incantation, and a virgin to read it, and it will suck up and imprison the monsters forever. Time is running out, though, as the fateful day is closing in and Dracula knows that the kids have the diary.
All that said, Del definitely has more of a role in the film than his wife, Emily (Mary Ellen Trainor), whose only major part is to give Sean Van Helsing's diary (she actually mistakes him for being Godzilla's archenemy rather than Dracula's). Other than that, she's little more than the other half of that needless subplot about Sean and Phoebe's parents having problems in their marriage and someone who glares at Sean when he uses profanity in front of her. During the third act, she's little more than a bystander, though she tries to help Phoebe when she's threatened by Dracula but is restrained by a police officer. Del's partner, Detective Rich Sapir (Stan Shaw), doesn't fare much better, as he spends most of the story doing little more than making light of the seemingly ridiculous nature of what's going on, like the disappearance of the Mummy from the museum and when Del leaves the station following the call he got from the transforming Wolf Man, often jokingly remarking that he's a really good cop and notices little things. There are times when he does get serious, like when the Wolf Man's body disappears after he's gunned down in the police station and when puts an APB out on a large, black hearse that was seen near the site of the coroner van's crash, but he doesn't believe there are actual monsters around until he and Del both encounter Dracula. Before Sapir can do anything to help his partner, though, Dracula kills him by blowing him up, along with their police car. And Lisa (Lisa Fuller), Patrick's teenage sister, is initially little more than the target of Rudy's voyeurism when he watches her through her bedroom window from the clubhouse (to be fair, he didn't know she was Patrick's sister at the time), as she has a bad habit of getting undressed right at her bedroom window. However, she's ultimately blackmailed into helping them defeat the monsters by reading the incantation... that is, until she finishes it and nothing happens, prompting Patrick to ask, "You're not a virgin, are you?" Lisa's answer? "Well, Steve, but he doesn't count," to which Patrick yells, "Doesn't count?!" She's basically useless from there on out and runs and hides, along with Patrick, when Dracula appears.
The one exception to the notion of adults in this movie being insignificant is Scary German Guy (Leonardo Cimino), whom the kids initially think is a sinister old man who lives in a big, eerie-looking house, but when Sean, Horace, and Patrick meet him when they go to see if he can translate Van Helsing's diary for them, he turns out to be a kindly gentleman who's more than happy to do so. Thanks to him, they learn about the amulet, its power, and why Dracula and the other monsters are in town, searching for it. Moreover, he doesn't disbelieve the idea at all, partly because of how emphatic and earnest Van Helsing's writing is but also because, as the concentration camp tattoo that's revealed on his wrist proves, he himself has experienced true evil in his life, knowing quite a bit about monsters, as Horace notes. He's also a vital part of the third act, in that he saves Sean, Horace, and Eugene when he picks them up after they escape the monsters and, during the climactic battle, he helps Lisa, and then Phoebe, in reading the incantation necessary to open the portal to Limbo. Speaking of Van Helsing (Jack Gwillim), he kind of bookends the movie, as it opens with him and his band raiding Dracula's castle in Transylvania in order to send the count to Limbo then but, as is revealed by the ending, he ended up getting sucked in himself when things got out of hand. However, when Phoebe opens up Limbo, Van Helsing suddenly reappears to drag Dracula through the portal with him, he and Sean exchanging thumbs up as he does so. Other than that, Van Helsing is only there to serve as backstory and fill his role of Dracula's archenemy, and though he kills one of the vampire brides upon storming the castle, he's far from Peter Cushing levels of awesomeness (in fact, his look reminds me of Laurence Olivier's in the 1979 film of Dracula).
One of the reasons why I do enjoy this film is because, even though I didn't see it when I was a young kid, watching it makes me remember what the month of October was like for me when I was around that age. I don't know if it's supposed to be set during that time of the year but, regardless, I look at these kids who are absolutely into monsters, know everything there is to know about them, and I think, "That was me." I would not only watch the movies but read books about them and the lore around them and, come October, it felt it was especially cool and the right time to be into them. I was not only interested in the monsters themselves but also just how they were connected to this time of year and the holiday of Halloween because, I said, they were what the first things that came to mind when I thought about it as a kid. Back before corporations began shoving Christmas down your throat before October had barely gotten started, Halloween managed to take over and rule everything, as you'd see costumes, masks, and all types of decorations, like fake spiders, rubber bats, plastic jack-o-lanterns, pumpkin and ghost-shaped bags you could fill up with leaves and, my personal favorite, these little, animatronic monster figures, in the stores, filling up several aisles, it seemed like. And for some reason, that shot of the kids walking down the road with Frankenstein's monster makes me think of a commercial I remember seeing when I was a kid, of him carrying a Pepsi truck over a hill, tearing some cans out of it, and showing up at door, which is opened by Dracula. When the monster shows him that he has the Pepsi and some Doritos, Dracula says, "What? No dip?" I think I might have seen something more akin to that actual shot (perhaps another commercial or maybe even a very brief, fleeting glimpse of the movie itself) around that time but that particular commercial has always stuck in my mind. I'm going on something of a tangent here but I can't help it, because that's the kind of stuff this movie makes me think of.
What I find interesting about the film is how it's able to balance a couple of different styles and tones without really feeling jarring about it. On the one hand, it's most certainly a kid-oriented movie... one where the kids use profanity, mind you, but that was hardly a shocker by this point (The Sandlot is a great kids movie but it has some profanity as well) and it's not like they say anything really bad. Not only do you have the scenario of the kids being the ones savvy enough to know about the monsters and, as a result, are the only ones capable of stopping them, you also have instances of that typical, young boy type of mentality where they don't want any little girls in their club. At the same time, Rudy brings a teenage point of view to the proceedings, as he uses binoculars to spy on the lovely young woman whose bedroom window is across from the clubhouse and the younger ones initially go to him to try to find a virgin to read the incantation. The kids also have their own vernacular, like "dork," "dorked," and "nards," among others, and their have a clubhouse up in a tree is a very kiddish concept (at least, at the time, it was). And while the monsters are definitely cool, with really great designs to them, they are pretty much what a kid who's seen all those movies would expect to face if they came across vampires, werewolves, resurrected mummies, and such, and the same goes for the old, creepy, rundown house where they first encounter them (makes me think of something in a monster-oriented, Saturday morning cartoon, like Scooby-Doo or the first episode of Tales from the Cryptkeeper). But, all that said, there also moments where the movie plays like a no nonsense horror film. The opening, despite its typical graveyard and creepy, old castle setting, as well as the usual situation of Van Helsing coming to face Dracula, has a rather eerie series of shots showing Dracula going from bat to human form, and when Van Helsing and his men storm the castle, a vampire bride, who was munching on a possum, is promptly shot in the throat with an arrow and, as they try to read the incantation, the place starts quaking and freaky-looking corpses erupt out of the ground. During the main story, it becomes clear that the monsters, especially Dracula, are playing for keeps, as the Wolf Man kills a young coroner van driver (following glimpses of a transformation somewhat akin to that of An American Werewolf in London), Dracula turns some poor women he's abducted and holding prisoner into vampires themselves, the monsters actively attack and try to kill the kids, Dracula blows up their clubhouse with dynamite and kills Del's partner on the force in the same way, and during the climax, monsters get staked and shot left-and-right. It never gets so violent that it becomes stronger than its PG-13 rating (though when the Wolf Man gets blown up, his body parts are quite a bit bloody when you see them strewn across the ground) but the addition of the unsettling look of Dracula halfway between man and bat at one point, cops getting tossed around and having their limbs broken, and that intense confrontation between Dracula and little Phoebe does make it clear that this movie is probably most suitable for older kids.
As I said in the introduction, this movie is more than a little simple in terms of its writing and storytelling. The characters are likable but they can hardly be called deep, many of the adults are superfluous, and their aspects of the film, such as the subplot of Sean and Phoebe's parents having marital problems and Del's investigation into the strange events leading him to realize, like his son, that there are monsters around, are touched upon so briefly that they might as well not be there. The relationship between Phoebe and Frankenstein's monster doesn't work as well for me as Fred Dekker probably intended, as we don't actually see the moment where they form their bond and after she introduces him to the boys, we only get one bit of the two of them playing together during the montage where everyone is preparing to face the monsters. Their friendship comes off as rather superficial to me and, as a result, I don't find it to be all that sad when they're separated by him being dragged into Limbo at the end; in fact, it comes off as a bit forced and deliberately schmaltzy, like something that just had to be in a kid-oriented movie during this period. This might not be all Dekker's fault, though, as he says that about 13 minutes of material was cut by the studio in order to keep the movie under 90 minutes and it's possible that there could have been stuff in there that would have fleshed things out a little more. However, while this isn't a big deal and is just an example of me over-analyzing things, I have wonder how these monsters can exist in a universe where the original movies featuring them are just movies. I know that's the point, to have these kids run into the "real-life" Dracula, Frankenstein monster, Wolf Man, and such, but how is that, in the context of this universe, the real monsters can look so much like their film counterparts? How could it be that the makers of those old films came so close to reality, rather than having to improvise due to the limitations of time and budget? And how can Van Helsing be both a character in the movies, to the point where Sean's mom gets confused as to what monster he opposes, and a real nemesis to the real Dracula? Again, it's just me being more analytical with this movie than I should. But one last thing that really makes me roll my eyes is the idea of the military actually showing up at the end, responding to a letter that Eugene wrote to them in crayon about monsters being around. As kiddish as Dekker may have meant this movie to be, that was where I felt he went way too far.
Going back to the subject of style, The Monster Squad is a movie that's quite appealing visually. The cinematography by Bradford May is very lush and rich, with lots of warm colors for the outside daytime scenes (said colors are what make it kind of feel like fall to me) and appropriately dark and atmospheric lighting effects for the interiors of the creepy, old house that the monsters dwell in. The nighttime exterior scenes look kind of standard for the most part but the addition of the glowing, green amulet adds some nice color to the scenes and the opening, set in Dracula's castle in the 1800's, is completely bathed in a rich, golden light, with lots of nice shadows and contrasts. Likewise, the production design by Albert Brenner is top notch. While the town is pretty ordinary and nondescript (the main square was actually built inside of a studio at Warner Bros.), many of the other environments are quite stylized and large-than-life in how they look. The section at the beginning looks typically 1800's and Gothic, with Dracula's castle being the type of old, rundown, stone building you'd expect it to be, with a classic, spooky graveyard nearby. The marsh where the crate containing Frankenstein's monster falls and where all of the monsters gather together is also unreal and kind of comic book-esque, especially at night, where you have lots of mist and flashing lightning (I have a feeling that scene was done inside a studio as well), and as I said, the rundown house at Shadow-Brook Road where the monsters take up residence is right out of a kid-oriented Halloween story, with secret passages and a trapdoor opened by pulling a statue's arm, a dungeon in the cellar where Frankenstein's monster is kept, and a sealed room where Van Helsing's disciples hid the amulet after the doctor got sucked into Limbo, with garlic and crosses all around it. And I also have to mention the squad's clubhouse in the tree in Sean's backyard, which is such a trope of the time, particularly the "NO GIRLS" on the bottom of the hatch on the floor, and the inside of which is covered in different movie posters and drawings. Just looking at those posters, you can tell that these kids definitely know what the good stuff is.
Look-wise, Regehr's Dracula has virtually the same type of outfit that Bela Lugosi wore in the 1931 Dracula, with the dress suit beneath his cape, the inside of his cape being red (which Lugosi's was, though you'd never know, as it was a black-and-white movie), the medallion he wears around his neck, and the ring on his finger, which is supposed to be the actual one that Lugosi wore. Alec Gillis no doubt had a pretty simple task in designing the makeup for Dracula, as it must have been just stuff they put on him to make his skin look very pale, as well as some subtle prosthetics (as a result, in some shots, the lighting does make him look a little like Lugosi), as well as fake fangs and red eyes for when he really goes into vampire mode. At the same time, though, Gillis also handled Dracula's bat-to-man transformations, which you get glimpses of at the beginning, as you see his wing shifting into a human hand, with the webbing retracting and his arm becoming less hairy, and, during the climax, there's a moment where Del sees him when he's halfway into the change after he's crashed into an upper floor of an office building upon being shot. This form is basically Regehr's head, with more hair, pointier ears, and bat-like aspects of his face, atop a man-sized, bat body and it's a pretty startling sight in that it's kind of unexpected and is really good makeup. I also like the way Regehr voices Dracula, in that, when he speaks (which isn't a lot), he doesn't try to imitate Lugosi, which would have just sounded hokey, but rather creates a sophisticated but still threatening sound that makes him feel like anything but a parody. It doesn't hurt that he has some really nice lines, such as when, after tossing the dynamite into the clubhouse, he says, "Meeting adjourned," as he walks away and later simply tells Del, "I will have your son," before turning into a bat and flying away. Besides his bat transformations and his superhuman strength, Dracula is shown to have other powers, like the ability to instantly light the dynamite's fuses and fire a beam from his hand that sends Scary German Guy flying. As if that weren't enough, he drives around in a big, black hearse that has a skull as a hood ornament, teeth in the grill, and can pass through objects if it needs to!
John Rosengrant, who'd already worked with Stan Winston on The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator at this point, and would go on to work on the Jurassic Park movies, Congo, The Ghost and the Darkness, The Sixth Sense, and many other movies, served as the head monster maker on the Wolf Man. His design only resembles what Lon Chaney Jr. looked like in those movies in the broadest sense, as the face doesn't have as pronounced a nose as that classic makeup design, instead going for a more obvious snout (the face actually looks kind of squashed from certain angles and doesn't look that good to me, overall), and the ripped open, white shirt exposing the hairy body reminds me more of how Oliver Reed looked in the Hammer film, The Curse of the Werewolf. The transformation effects are done in that same style that Rob Bottin and Rick Backer employed in The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, first with just glimpses of his hands and legs changing in the back of the coroner's van but later showing his face changing in the phone booth (he really looks like Reed's werewolf in the close-up of his face in that scene) and his shoulder blades stretching and bursting through the back of his shirt. That aforementioned effect of his body parts rejoining after he's been blown up, as well as his hands and feet twitching beforehand, are equally well-done.
When it came to the visual effects, Fred Dekker was able to get another master of his respective field: Richard Edlund, who'd worked on Ghostbusters and Big Trouble in Little China at this point. Granted, there aren't that many visual effects sequences in The Monster Squad, but for those that are here, Edlund and his crew at Boss Films managed to create some good stuff, such as the swirling portal into Limbo in the sky and the effects of people being sucked into it, the onscreen transitions from Dracula into his bat form (the one at the beginning where he's hovering in midair in the plane's cargo hold looks especially cool, as it looks like Duncan Regehr literally dissolves into the form of the bat), the matte shot of the bat descending downward towards the town during the climax, that shot where Dracula's face turns into a grinning skull for a split second during a lightning flash, the energy emitting from the amulet, the power beam that Dracula fires, and even minor effects that you wouldn't think about, like when Sean is watching the movie screen at the drive-in from the roof of his house. Naturally, some of it looks a little dated, like the blue screen effects, the matte effects, and the animation and rotoscoping that's used in some shots (the part where Dracula's hearse passes through Del and Sapir's squad car looks especially archaic), but it all works well enough to where its dated nature ultimately adds to the charm of this very 80's movie.
The movie begins with a red text crawl that tells how, one hundred years before the story begins, Abraham Van Helsing and a group of freedom fighters attempted to rid the world of monsters and save mankind from the eternal evil, ending with the line, THEY BLEW IT. Thunder, wind, and wolves howling can be heard as the crawl nears its end, and the opening credits play over a panning shot of an old, rundown cemetery, as a lightning storm rages overhead. The camera pans over to reveal Castle Dracula and transitions inside its crypt to reveal three coffins. Following a shot of an armadillo roaming around on the floor (a nod to the 1931 Dracula), one of the coffin's lids is shown sliding open and a female hand reaches out from under it, along with a bunch of tarantulas. Up in the rafters above the crypt, a large, ugly bat hanging there transforms, its wing morphing into a human hand as the webbing between its fingers retracts, before shifting into a hairy, more human-like hand in-between shots, before Count Dracula drops to the floor in his complete human form. The camera pulls back to show him framed between the other coffins in his crypt before he walks up a short bit of stairs, as bats flutter around him. Outside, Van Helsing and his posse of freedom fighters make their way to the castle, blowing open its main gate with dynamite, and making their way inside. Coming across one of Dracula's brides, who's been feeding on a possum, Van Helsing promptly kills her with by shooting her with a wooden stake from a crossbow. Seeing the glowing amulet resting on a podium between a couple of flights of stairs, Van Helsing glances at his watch and proclaims, "Three minutes. The girl, now!" One of his men then brings in a young woman and she begins reading an incantation in front of the amulet, Van Helsing imploring her to read faster, when things start going haywire: the windows suddenly explode, the floor quakes and opens up enormous fissures, and living, decaying corpses emerge from said fissures. Van Helsing tells the girl, "Read, or we're all going to die!" She continues, as more zombie-like corpses emerge from the quaking floor, and then, the swirling portal into Limbo opens up in front of her. She's instantly sucked in, as Van Helsing is thrown to the floor and attacked by one of the corpses, as everything around him, including his own men, are sucked into Limbo. Before his own fate is shown, though, the film suddenly cuts to black and transitions to modern day.
Following Sean and Patrick's introduction, where they're in the principal's office, getting admonished by him for drawing pictures of monsters when they're in science class, we get introduced to Horace, as he's wandering through the schoolyard, looking at a magazine and eating a Snickers. Unfortunately for him, he runs into a couple of bullies, E.J. and Derick, who instantly start making fun of him for his weight, with Derick talking about how he's "blocking traffic," which E.J. knocks the Snickers out of his hand and stomps on it. Horace says he has a glandular problem, adding that at least he doesn't have a stupidity problem, prompting E.J. and Derick, after mocking Horace's name, to take his magazine, rips it in half, and throws it to the ground. Horace mutters, "You're such an asshole," under his breath and E.J., after calling him a faggot (for the second time), he gets him down on the ground, sits on him, and starts smacking his face repeatedly, a crowd of kids gathering around them and cheering on the fight. However, everything stops dead and E.J. turns and looks to see that Rudy has arrived on his bicycle. Lighting a cigarette by striking a match on the heel of his shoe, Rudy says, "I see you met my friend Horace," whom he asks if he's okay. When E.J. tries to speak, Rudy shushes him and tells him that he dropped his candy bar, referring to the Snickers he knocked out of Horace's hand, telling him that it's his now. Rudy then threatens him into eating it and E.J., completely intimidated, picks it up off the ground and reluctantly bites into it, the other kids making disgusted sounds, while Horace watches with a satisfied look on his face. Following that, after a bit of Sean and Patrick walking home, debating the finer points of monster trivia, and catching a glimpse of "Scary German Guy" as he watches them from behind the curtains of his house, Horace shows up and tells them of Rudy saving him, asking him if he can be in the club. After talking it over, they decide to give him the monster test, the scene ending with Phoebe seeing the German Guy peeking at her through the curtains again.
The scene transitions to a cargo plane, the name "BROWNING" on the side of its tail (a reference to Tod Browning, director of the original Dracula), as one of the two pilots complains about his job and that he's carrying crates with some dead guys as his cargo. They then heard a wooden bang in the cargo hold and, confused because the people in the crates are supposed to be dead, the one pilot decides to go and check on it. Walking back there, he has to dodge a bat that flies at him when he approaches the crates, and when he stands back up, the camera reveals that Dracula is standing behind him. Acting all tough, saying, "Come on. Come on. Come on. Where are you, you son of a bitch?", he turns around and illuminates Dracula, whom promptly smacks him to the floor. The vampire approaches one crate, marked "FRANKENSTEIN," and rubs its lid. The pilot looks up and, seeing this, pulls the switch that opens the hatch beneath the crate. It falls out but Dracula, to his shock, hovers there, and after his cape is sucked out, he changes into a bat and flies down through the hatch. The pilot looks out through the hatch in bewilderment at what he just saw, while down below, the crate splashes into a marsh. Dracula, still in his bat form, hangs from a nearby tree branch, his eyes glowing red.
Back at Sean's house, the kids give Rudy the monster test in the clubhouse (Dracula's cape is hanging on a tree branch nearby) and, while he's clearly more interested in looking at the hot young woman who's standing at her bedroom window in just her bra and underwear, he does prove to be knowledgeable about certain things, like a stake through the heart and daylight being the ways to kill a vampire, Frankenstein being the name of the scientist, and a silver bullet being the only way to kill a werewolf (Patrick argues that there's another way but none of the other kids are able to actually come up with it). Sean's mom then calls him and Phoebe in for dinner and he hurries down to his house, forgetting to tell Rudy if he's in the club or not, and in the house, he learns that his mother, Emily, has something for him: an old book she got at a garage sale, which was found at a rundown house up on Shadow-Brook Road. Sean is ecstatic when he finds that it's Van Helsing's diary, but his excitement diminishes when he finds it's written in German. That night, a menacing, black hearse with a skull hood ornament and teeth in the grill parks on a hill overlooking the town. Dracula steps out and, looking down on the town, says, "Let it begin," as lightning flashes overhead, his face turning into a grinning skull for a split second during a flash. Back at Sean's house, he's disappointed to learn that his dad can't take him and his friends to see a movie, as he and his wife have to go see the marriage counselor. But then, Del gets a call from the station and his partner, Detective Sapir, who glances at a guy who's insisting that he's a werewolf argue with an officer, pleading to be locked up, tells him, "Bad news." Del tries to slip out but his wife sees him and is none too happy about him asking to reschedule the appointment with the counselor. Back at the station, Sapir heads out to meet Del, as the man continues to insist he's a werewolf and tells them to put him in a cage. He gets so crazed that the officers try to restrain him, throwing him on a table and attempting to handcuff him. Looking out the window and seeing the full moon in the sky, the man suddenly rises up, punches one officer off him, struggles with another who jumps on his back and flings him over a desk, and grabs and throws a third cop right through a window. He dodges a punch from another cop, grabs him from behind, pulls his gun out of his holster, and flings him into the wall. The man fires two shots into the ceiling and yells, "Lock me up!", only to get shot three times by a young cop who came running in.
Meanwhile, Del and Sapir are at the town museum, where a 2,000-year old mummy has disappeared and the security guard says he didn't hear anybody come in or leave. Sapir, however, isn't taking it seriously, asking the guard if he took the mummy at one point and then jokingly proclaiming that the case is too hard and he and Del should be firemen instead. Del, on the other hand, is not amused, telling him, "The problem is, 2,000-year old dead guys do not get up and walk away by themselves!" (That's one of those instances where I feel Fred Dekker is a little too on the nose in his writing. It's not as groan-inducing as the line from Night of the Creeps, "I'd personally rather have my brain invaded by creatures from outer space," but it's still cringey.) Of course, the next cut shows the Mummy doing just that, shambling through the street and into a yard, while nearby, the van containing the body of the man from the station heads to the morgue. The young driver is too busy listening to his music to respond to a confirmation request over his radio, while in the back, the full moon triggers a transformation in the not quite dead man, as his arms grow hairy and his now clawed toenails burst out of the tips of his shoes. In an instant, the fully-changed werewolf lurches up with a snarl and attacks the van driver, grabbing him by the face. While Sean watches the movie he wanted to see from the top of his roof through binoculars, and is joined by his dad, Sapir has to respond to the scene where the coroner van crashed and is irritated at having to explain to the dispatch man that the body that was in the van is missing, making it the second one that's gone missing that night. At the nearby marsh, the growling Wolf Man shows up and soon comes across Dracula, who brings him to heel. The Mummy is there as well, and the two of them follow Dracula to the edge of the water, as he points his staff at it. Doing so seems to make the water bubble, as the crate with FRANKENSTEIN written on it rises to the surface, only for it to be revealed that the Gill-Man is lifting it up from below. He tosses it to the shore and the monsters gather around it. Dracula has the Mummy hold his staff as he takes the lid of the crate, revealing Frankenstein's monster. Talking about how it's been so long, Dracula takes two electrodes from the head of his cane and attaches them to the metal clamps in the monster's head. Turning the rod of the cane skyward, Dracula says, "Wake up, old friend. It is our time," and the rod then extends by several feet, catching a bolt of lightning that strikes down towards them. Electricity surges through the wires and into the monster, as the others look up at the lightning in awe. Frankenstein's monster then awakens, mumbling, "Master," upon seeing Dracula and reaches his hand up to him, as the other monsters get very excited as the lightning continues flashing, with the Wolf Man letting out a howl.
Back at his house, Sean overhears his mom and dad arguing about how he skipped out on their session with the counselor, when he sees a message on a board about someone named Mr. Alucard called for him and is interested in Van Helsing's diary. Noticing something odd about the name, he sits down and writes it on a piece of paper, as he hears Del tell Emily about the disappearance of the mummy and about the man who claimed he was a werewolf. It takes him just seconds to realize that "Alucard" is Dracula spelled backwards, a realization that shocks him. Elsewhere, club member Eugene wakes up his dad in the middle of the night, claiming there's a monster in his closet. His dad swings open the door to his room and, turning on the light, humors him, claiming to see that it's full of monsters and yelling at them to get out. Once he acts like he's gotten rid of them, he asks Eugene is he sees any more and he points at the closet. Again, attempting to humor his son, he opens the closet door but doesn't look in, instead standing beside the door and acting like a big monster just ran out; had he looked inside, he would have seen the Mummy lurking in there. Closing the door, and with Eugene covering his eyes, he tells him that he's not sleeping with him and his mom and also threatens to take away his monster magazines if this happens again. Walking out, he pats Eugene on the head, and his son then turns around to get a glimpse of the Mummy slipping out through the window, prompting him to cover his eyes again. (This isn't important, but I smile when I see that Eugene is wearing a Robotech T-shirt here, as I watched that show a lot as a kid.)
The next scene has the kids meeting in the clubhouse again, with Sean writing "MONSTER SQUAD" on a small chalkboard, telling the others that it refers to them. He then tells them that he thinks that there are real monsters around, telling them about the man at the police station who claimed that he was werewolf and was shot, only for his body to disappear from the coroner's van and for the driver to be found dead. He also mentions the mummy disappearing from the museum, prompting Eugene to add, "Mummy came in my house," and that he thinks Dracula may be around as well. Getting frustrated with how they're not taking it seriously, Sean tells them that if there are monsters around, no one but them will be able to do anything about it. He shows them Van Helsing's diary and says that it might be the key. Asking them if they're the Monster Squad or not, they then put their hands together, making it official. Elsewhere, at the house where the diary was found, Dracula makes his way through a secret passage that leads down into the cellar, where Frankenstein's monster is being kept in a dank, dark cell. After asking him how he likes his new home, he walks into the cell and sits down in front of the monster, telling him that he wants him to retrieve Van Helsing's diary. Adding that it's in the hands of some children, he tells the monster to find them and take the diary, saying that he is to kill them if they don't cooperate, which he reluctantly agrees to.
The next day, while Sean, Horace, and Patrick meet Scary German Guy while trying to get the gumption to go up to his house and knock, Phoebe is playing next to the pond behind the clubhouse, when a shadow falls over her and she looks to see Frankenstein's monster standing near her. When we cut back to the German Guy's house, he's wielding a knife and tells the boys that time is almost up, but it's then revealed that he means for them to get a piece of the pie on the table in front of the couch. Slicing a piece and handing it to Horace on a plate, he goes back to translating Van Helsing's diary, getting to the part about the amulet and finding a drawing of it; Horace, quite taken with him now, says, "Scary German Guy's bitchin'!" The German Guy goes on to tell them about how good and evil are in constant flux, only becoming balanced once every one hundred years, and that the amulet is concentrated good. He continues that, normally, it can't be destroyed, but every hundred years, at the stroke of midnight, it becomes vulnerable and, if it's shattered, the balance will shift towards evil and the world will be plunged into darkness. Adding that there is a way to stop it, via the ceremony to open a portal into Limbo, he says that, in his last entry in the diary, Van Helsing was heading out to attempt the ceremony himself. He then sees that the date on the entry was one hundred years from the following day, a fact whose meaning Sean slowly processes. They then leave the house, saying goodbye to the German Guy, who says that he knows they thought of him as a monster himself, though he assures that he's not. Horace mentions that he seems to know a lot about monsters and he simply says, "Now that you mention it, I suppose I do." Closing the door, it's revealed that he has a concentration camp number on the side of his left arm.
Realizing the dire nature of the situation and how difficult it will be to stop Dracula from using the amulet to take over the world, Sean tries to organize the squad, telling Rudy to find them some silver bullets and Horace to find Shadow-Brook Road on a map. When they arrive back at his, Phoebe tries to get their attention, ultimately biting in Sean's hand to finally get him to listen. After he yells at her, saying that he's telling their mom, she goes, "Would you look?!", and points. That's when Frankenstein's monster comes out from behind the tree that the clubhouse is in. The boys take one look at him and run for the house's backyard, taking cover wherever they can find it, with Horace actually getting into a garbage can. But then, they see Phoebe take the monster's hand and tell them, "It's okay, you guys. He's friends with us. Come on! Don't be chickenshit." As she guides him over to the yard, Sean decides to be the brave guy and approach him, much to the fear of the others. Walking up to and looking at the monster, Sean asks him if he's dead, to which he says, "Dead?" Learning from Phoebe that their mom has no idea, Sean gets excited and, giving the monster a friendly slap on the arm, tells the others to stop hiding. The monster decides to return the slap, only to push Sean and make him nearly face-plant on the ground, with Phoebe asking if she can now be part of the club. In the next scene, they're up in the clubhouse with him, Sean still trying to process the idea that he's there, though the others still aren't exactly thrilled about it. The monster then identifies Phoebe's stuffed dog, Scraps, and after she says that she taught him to talk, he intones, "Bo-gus," and, "Give me... a... break." The boys discuss what to do, while the monster turns and sees the same nice-looking woman, Patrick's sister, Lisa, standing at her window, wearing a pink robe and beginning to take it off. Smiling at this, he unintentionally hits the "snap" button on the camera set up there, yelling, "Bogus! Bogus," at it. Rudy then hands him a box and the monster opens it to reveal a paper mask of himself. He initially smiles at it but then smacks it to the floor and, realizing it's him, touches his own face and, motioning towards it, says, "Scary?" This wins everybody else over and, in the next shot, they're all walking down the street with the monster, proving that he's their new best bud.
That night, at the house on Shadow-Brook road, Dracula searches the cellar for the amulet, saying that he can sense that it's near, while the Wolf Man follows behind him, carrying a hammer and a lantern. Dracula talks about how Van Helsing's disciples did a clumsy job of hiding it, when he hits upon the section of the wall that he feels it's behind. Taking the hammer, he smashes through the weak wall and, digging out a little more of it, he sees the green-glowing amulet sitting on a podium in a room beyond the wall. Ecstatic at this, he says, "Soon, Van Helsing. Soon, the creatures of the night shall rule the world, and there is no one to stop us!" Little does he know that a force is mounting to oppose him. The next morning, Sean jumps out of bed when his alarm clock wakes him up and puts his pants on, leading into a montage set to the song, Rock Until You Drop. While the boys go to school like normal, they're also preparing for the night ahead, with Rudy creating wooden stakes in shop-class and also making a silver bullet (out of Emily Crenshaw's jewelry), Eugene writing a letter to the army that he prepares to mail, and Patrick making cards with their team's name on them. They also find Shadow-Brook Road on a map, Rudy takes a bow and a quiver of arrows out from under someone at archery class, and when he goes and develops some pictures, he comes across one that he doesn't expect, causing him to do a spit take (I think the joke is that it's the picture of Lisa after she removed her robe, which the Frankenstein monster unintentionally took). The montage ends with the monster, who's been playing with Phoebe all day, looking at the picture through some sunglasses, as the boys jump to try to grab out of his hand, which only prompts him to jump as well.
As nightfall approaches at the house on Shadow-Brook Road, Dracula has the man who becomes the Wolf Man tied up in a chair and apparently doped up, telling him that he regrets the dosage he gave him, as it's lethal by human standards, before adding, "But then, um, human standards do not apply, do they?" Dracula then decides, "Well, I'll go have a bite, while you change into something more... comfortable," and walks out of the room, towards a door with a padlock on it. Unlocking it, he opens it to reveal three frightened young women he's keeping prisoner in there and then, he promptly descends on them. Little does he know that the man was merely pretending to be doped up, as he spits out the pills, which he was holding in his mouth, and proceeds to get loose from the ropes. At the police station, after Del learns from Sapir about a black hearse that was scene near the sight of the ambulance crash and that he's already put an APB out on it, he gets a phone call from the man, who tells him to get all of his men and head down to 666 Shadow-Brook Road, as Dracula has found the amulet. When Del asks who he's talking to, the man tells him who he is and Del, thinking it's a prank, is about to hang up on him. As he begins to transform, he manages to tell Del, "He's gonna kill your son!", before he changes completely, his face stretching into the wolf face and his back and shoulder blades arching up. The Wolf Man then smashes through the booth and runs down the road, howling as he goes. Elsewhere, Sean, Eugene, and Horace, along with Pete and Frankenstein's monster, arrive at a spot in the woods, with Sean using a walkie-talkie to contact Patrick, who, along with Rudy, is waiting for an opportunity to enlist Lisa in helping them. By the side of a lake there, Eugene tries to eat a Twinky, only for Pete to cause him to drop into the water while begging for attention. He then reaches to try and get it, only for the Gill-Man to rise out of the water and snarl at him. Pete takes off running and Eugene slowly backs away, as the monster ducks back under the water, all of which Sean is totally oblivious to. Eugene runs to Sean, constantly trying to get his attention, as he ends the call. When he finally gets him to listen, he tells him, "Creature stole my Twinky."
As Rudy and Patrick try to find out if Lisa is a virgin, and coerce her into helping them with the photos of her, the others are staking out the house at Shadow-Brook Road. Horace is starting to chicken out, saying that they should go back to the clubhouse and rethink things, and when he keeps whining, Sean reminds that if they don't do something, the world will end at midnight. Frankenstein's monster then says, "Master... is near. Master wants children dead." They all then head towards the house, with Horace bringing up the rear, still suggesting they change the squad's specialty to something else. Down in the house's cellar, Dracula prepares to blow open the chamber containing the amulet, as the kids and the monster enter the house. Walking into the middle of the main hall, Horace, again, tries to bail on the whole thing, but Sean tells him that they have an edge since, not only is Frankenstein's monster on their side but, also, his dad is a cop. Sean then motions for the monster, who's been standing around in the doorway, to come in, but when he does, his weight causes the floorboards to creak loudly. Hearing this down below, Dracula hits the plunger, exploding the dynamite and causing the ceiling near the door to cave in, burying the monster. Horace and Eugene rush to try to help him but Sean makes them realize how fruitless their efforts are. Not wanting for his sacrifice to be in vain, Sean tells them that they should try to find the amulet and get out. The Wolf Man then jumps into the hallway, snarling and threatening them. When he faces Horace and Eugene, Sean tells the former to kick him in "the nards," and after arguing about whether or not he has any, Horace kicks him and, to his amazement, the Wolf Man doubles over in pain. With that, Horace and Eugene rush past the werewolf, with Pete going between his legs, and they join Sean. Running into the depths of the house, they go down one corridor and open some doors, only to find Dracula's brides waiting for them. They run down the hallway in the opposite direction but are then faced with Dracula himself. Turning to their right, they then see that the Wolf Man is prowling towards them. Surrounded, and with the monsters closing in, Sean, in desperation, pulls on the arm of the statue behind him, hoping it will open a secret panel; instead, it opens a trapdoor beneath them and they fall through.
At the hamburger joint where Sean and the others were supposed to meet them, Rudy and Patrick, who are there with Lisa, realize something is wrong since they're late and Patrick can't get them on the walkie-talkie. Back at the house, the boys find themselves in a dusty room, with a corpse lying against the wall. As Horace complains about how crappy their situation is and Eugene continuously says that he wants to go home, Sean looks up at a blown open section of the wall and sees the amulet, as it fills the room with an eerie, green glow. Walking into the room, which is filled with crosses and garlic in order to ward off Dracula, Sean takes the amulet and walks back out, showing the others that he has it. Dracula then grabs him by the throat, demanding that he give him the amulet, and as Sean struggles with the vampire, Horace pulls out something wrapped in tinfoil. Revealing it to be a slice of pizza, he touches the side of Dracula's face with it, promptly burning him and causing him to yell in pain, as it's heavy on the garlic. With Dracula distracted, they run for it, out of the house and into the surrounding woods. Reaching the road, they're surprised when Scary German Guy pulls up in a topless land-rover, with Phoebe sitting beside him. Rudy, Patrick, and Lisa then show up, and after Patrick assures him that she is a virgin, Sean looks at the amulet and sees that it's glowing a white color now. He says they have to go somewhere with a lot of people and Patrick suggests the church at the town plaza, which Sean feels is perfect since, "Monsters hate religious stuff." They all pile into the rover, while at the station, Del proceeds to check up on the man's claim of Sean being in danger by heading out to Shadow-Brook Road. He's joined by Sapir, despite the fact that he cannot keep himself from laughing about it. Meanwhile, as the rover streaks down the road, Sean tells them that it's just twenty minutes until midnight, when the Mummy walks out into the road in front of them. German Guy swerves to miss him but, as they pass, he actually jumps and grabs onto the back of the vehicle. He then reaches for Phoebe, as the others try to stop him, while the German Guy attempts to keep from flying off the road. Rudy tells Patrick to give him some slack of the Mummy's bandages but he's too scared to do so; however, Pete grabs a piece of bandage with his mouth and gives it to Rudy. Tying it around an arrow, Rudy points and fires, the arrow sticking into the side of a tree, and when the bandage catches after being stretched out, the Mummy is quickly unraveled and his body crumbles into dust. His torso falls off the back and, within seconds, they're just dragging a long bandage across the road, as the Mummy's skull tumbles across it and falls in place.
In another part of the area, Del is speeding towards Shadow-Brook Road like crazy, ignoring Sapir's warning about it, when they see another car round the bend ahead of them. The vehicle, Dracula's hearse, comes straight at them, despite Del's attempt to avoid it, and when it seems like they're going to crash, it passes right through the police car. Del swerves the car around and, as they watch the hearse go, Sapir decides that he's not going to say another thing, which Del says he appreciates. At the Crenshaw house, Emily notices when a candle suddenly extinguishes itself, as Dracula drives up outside and smashes through the white, picket fence. Getting out, he stomps to the back, rips the back door off in rage, takes out a bundle of dynamite, and walks to the backyard. He throws the lit dynamite through the clubhouse's window and walks away, growling, "Meeting adjourned," before it explodes. Emily hears the explosion, while outside, Dracula walks back to the hearse, only for Del and Sapir to pull up. Del promptly jumps out and points his gun, telling Dracula to freeze. Dracula, in turn, instantly lights a spare stick of dynamite he has with him and tosses it under the squad car, as Sapir tries to call for backup. Before he can get out, the car explodes, killing him instantly, as Del dives for cover. Getting to his feet, Del moves in and fires on Dracula, but his shots do nothing. Dracula then tells him, "I will have your son," and changes into a bat, which Emily walks out the front door in time to see. As the bat flies off, Del becomes frantic in finding the kids and rushes into the house, searching and calling for them. Rushing upstairs and still not finding them, he grabs the walkie-talkie and tries to contact Sean on it. He manages to get through to him and Sean tells him where they are, prompting him to rush out to meet them.
Arriving at the town plaza, the group parks in front of the church and disembarks, only to find that it's locked when they try to open the door. With midnight quickly approaching, Sean decides they have no choice but to do the ceremony on the steps. Phoebe then gets their attention and makes them see that the vampire brides are heading down the main street towards them. They then try to get Lisa to begin reading the incantation, despite the fact that she admits she flunked German, and as she and the German Guy struggle with it, Rudy heads out with his bow and quiver to hold the vampires off. He faces off against them in the middle of the street, Lisa continuing to fumble with the incantation, and pulls a stake out of his quiver, shooting one of the brides with it using the bow. The bride drops to the ground, but Rudy is unable to get another stake out and use it with the bow before a second bride reaches him and grabs him by the neck, forcing him to stake her the old-fashioned way. Dracula, still in bat form, descends from the sky, arriving at the same time that Del does, cutting through the center of the park. Seeing the bat heading for them, Del fires on him and he crashes through the window of a nearby sporting goods store. Getting out of the car, Del tells Sean to stay where he is and heads to the building, up the flight of stairs inside to the floor where the bat crashed through. Bursting through that room, he comes across the disturbing sight of Dracula on the floor, caught halfway between his bat and human forms. Pulling out a stick of dynamite and lighting it, Del prepares to kill him the same way he killed Sapir, only to get knocked from behind by the Wolf Man, causing him to drop the dynamite. Turning to face the werewolf, Del gets punched in the face a couple of times before getting flung into a stack of boxes across the way. He's then picked up and slammed against some lockers, but before the Wolf Man can attack again, Sean shows up and gets his attention, smacking him in the face with a metal rod. As he grabs his face in pain, Del puts the dynamite down the rim of his pants and pushes him out the window. He explodes in midair and his pieces fall to the ground below, as Del and Sean share an embrace, only to see that Dracula escaped during the fight. However, as Rudy said during the monster test, there's only one way to kill a werewolf and that wasn't it. While German Guy and Patrick still struggle to get Lisa to read the incantation, the Wolf Man's body parts begin to twitch and move, his torso rising up as he pushes himself with his one, still attached arm. Lisa then manages to read the whole incantation and they cheer, but it's cut short when Limbo doesn't open up. In the alley, the Wolf Man's body completely reforms and he lets out a howl.
As they try to figure out why it's not working, Rudy sees the cops arriving, the car pulling up near him and the officers jumping out. They tell him to watch it and he turns around to see the Wolf Man behind him. The cops fire on the werewolf but it does nothing but anger him, and they move in to take him themselves, with one jumping on his back. At the church, German Guy and Patrick realize that Lisa isn't a virgin after all, as she admits that she did bang Steve but, for whatever reason, she didn't think he'd count. The Wolf Man flings one of the cops into the side of a parked car and easily dispenses with the others, flinging the one on his back to the ground. Thinking quick, Rudy takes the one cop's gun, empties the bullets, and loads it with the silver bullet he made earlier that day. Right when the Wolf Man finishes beating on the last cop left, Rudy aims and fires when he turns and looks at him, instantly dropping him. Within a second, he's turned back into the man he was and thanks Rudy before dying. Del and Sean make their way back to the street and Rudy tells the latter, "Told you: only one way to kill a werewolf." That's when the Gill-Man emerges from a manhole next to where Horace is standing, causing him to fall to the ground in fear, as some other cops try to restrain the monster. At the church, Eugene asks the German Guy if Phoebe is a virgin and, realizing that she is, he decides that she'll do and he'll help her read, since she's only five. Meanwhile, the Gill-Man has made short work of the cops who charged him, crushing one's head and throwing him to the ground, and now has his eyes set on Horace. The kid struggles to wrestle a rifle out of one of the fallen cops' hands, as the Gill-Man closes in on him. He runs to the store behind him and tries to get through the door but it's locked, and the two guys hiding in there, who just happen to be E.J. and Derrick, the two bullies, won't let him in. The Gill-Man is now almost on top of him and Horace, panicking, points the rifle and fires, hitting him right in the chest and dropping him to the ground. Horace watches as he takes his last breath and turns around when he hears E.J. call to him, "Hey, Fat Kid." He says, "Good job," but Horace emphasizes, "My name is Horace," cocking the gun to bring the point home.
German Guy is helping Phoebe read the incantation, when Dracula appears down the street, electrical energy sparking around his body as he stands in front of a police car. Seeing him, Patrick and Lisa run for it, while German Guy tries to keep Phoebe focused on the task at hand, telling her not to look up from the book. Dracula begins making his way towards them and the police try to stop him but they prove to be utterly powerless to do anything: one gets socked in the face and hits the ground, another gets his arm broken, a third gets his neck broken, and another two get flung to the ground. As he closes in, German Guy, seeing Phoebe's fear, tries to finish the incantation himself but gets shot down on his back by a hand ray from Dracula, leaving the girl defenseless. Dracula walks up to her and smiles as he looks down on her, slowly caressing her cheeks with his fingers. Del, seeing this, tries to run to help her but Sean holds him back, knowing he'll just get killed. Emily reaches the town plaza at that moment as well and watches as Dracula lifts Phoebe up by her chin, demanding he give her the amulet, which she's holding. She lets out a terrified scream and he hisses at her, his eyes blazing red and his teeth now turned into monstrous fangs. Like Del, Emily has to be held back by a police officer to keep from getting herself killed, when Dracula is suddenly grabbed from behind. Setting Phoebe down, he turns and faces Frankenstein's monster, who says, "Bogus," before sending his former master flying, impaling him on a metal spire of the fence around the church. As she takes the monster's hand, Phoebe is again aided by German Guy in finishing the incantation and when she does, the amulet begins shaking in her hand. German Guy takes it and throws it, as it then rips open the portal to Limbo, which begins sucking everything into it. Everyone braces themselves to keep from being pulled in as well, only for Dracula, who managed to loosen himself from the spire, to grab Sean, who's holding on with his dad, and drag him with him. Sean struggles to get loose from Dracula's grip, as the two of them are dragged towards the portal, and he ultimately has to grab a stake nearby and jam it into the vampire's chest. He manages to get off of him and Patrick pulls him to safety, as Dracula is suddenly grabbed by Van Helsing, who managed to escape Limbo long enough to do this. He and Sean exchange thumbs-ups, as he and Dracula are both pulled through the portal.
Limbo continues sucking everyone into it, with Frankenstein's monster struggling to escape the pull, as he stumbles towards Phoebe, who's taking cover behind an overturned park bench. Falling to his knees, he reaches for her hand and takes it, as the German Guy's land rover gets sucked into the portal behind them. Phoebe tells him not to go away and he calls her name, before telling her, "Bye," and letting go. As he's sucked towards the portal, Phoebe throws Scraps to him and, catching the toy, he waves at her and tells her bye again, before he's sucked in completely. Limbo closes up and Phoebe begins to cry over losing her friend, while everyone else manages to get back on their feet. Emily runs to Phoebe and comforts her, with Del joining them, followed by Sean. Suddenly, a tank, followed by a squad of ground troops and a couple of jeeps, pull into the town plaza. As everyone disembarks, the cigar-smoking general asks for Eugene and when the kid identifies himself, he asks him where the monsters are. All Eugene can say is, "Mummy came in my house," and the general, bewildered, asks, "Can somebody tell me what the Sam hill is going on around here?" Sean, along with the other members of the squad, walk up to him and tell him that they can tell him. He asks, "Well, who are you?", and Sean, giving him their card, says, "We're the Monster Squad." As the bewildered general looks down at the card, the kids celebrate their victory, while the adults just look confused, and the camera pulls back from the town plaza as the movie ends.
The music score was composed by Bruce Broughton, who had done Silverado and has also done the music for a lot of family friend projects, like Harry and the Hendersons, Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, both of the Homeward Bound films, and Stay Tuned, to name a few. The score is far from one of the movie's most memorable aspects but it gets the job done, managing to be fairly spooky, as well as big, threatening and epic, whenever it needs to, while also emphasizing the story's more child-like qualities, sometimes sounding mischievous and other times whimsical, particularly in the scenes between Phoebe and Frankenstein's monster. Save for this nice bit of triumphant music during that part when Horace emphasizes his name to the two bullies, as well as Dracula's menacing theme and those sweet-sounding bits I mentioned, there are no parts of the score that stand out to be as being particularly memorable but, again, the music fits the movie well enough to where it doesn't matter. There are also a couple of songs on the soundtrack, the more memorable of which is Rock Until You Drop, by Michael Sembello, which plays during the montage of the kids preparing to face the monsters. It doesn't really have any relevance to what's going on, and I've heard Fred Dekker say that he hates it and wishes it wasn't in the movie, but it's an upbeat, charming little song that makes me smile when I hear it. I like it a lot more than the song called The Monster Squad, which is credited to a group of the same name but I think was also actually done by Sembello, as he wrote it, along with Richard Rudolph. That song just sounds really cheesy and cringe-inducing to me, like something the studio forced them to put in there in order to get more of a buzz about the movie. It comes off as a poor man's version of Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. in my opinion.
