Trailer
Plot summary
Eleven-year-old Brian Stevenson and his family have moved to suburban Boston, where Brian feels isolated. One morning he is blamed for several pranks he did not commit and punished for them. He blames his six-year-old brother Eric, who says he saw a monster the night before. On the bus to their new school, Brian throws Eric's sack lunch out the window and it hits the bully Ronnie Coleman, and the two fight at school. Brian bets he can spend a night in Eric's room, sets booby traps there, and catches Maurice, a blue-skinned creature. The two find they share the same interests and become friends, and Maurice leads Brian through a portal under the bed into a world of monsters, junk food and video games, with staircases reaching the undersides of children's beds.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Little Monsters (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The monster underworld was built inside the abandoned Ideal Cement Plant at Castle Hayne, North Carolina, with stairs and bridges raised 20 to 30 feet within the building. Work there ate a third of the shooting days and pushed the film 16 days past schedule.
- Part of the appeal of the cement plant was that nothing done inside it could cause damage: explosions and collapses that would have wrecked the inside of a soundstage left its three-foot-thick walls untouched.
- Set production assistant Steve Head recalled shooting a sequence in which the little monsters use a flamethrower to clean an underworld dining room. It was cut, taking with it the introduction of the flamethrower Maurice later uses.
- Special effects make-up supervisor Robert Short puppeteered an evil toy clown that sprang out of the floorboards at Brian, Todd and Kiersten in Boy's room. The whole sequence was filmed and then dropped.
