Trailer
Plot summary
A century after Dr. Abraham Van Helsing failed to destroy Count Dracula with a magical amulet, the vampire crosses to the United States and gathers the Mummy, the Gillman and the Wolfman to help him retrieve the amulet and rule the world. In a small town, Sean Crenshaw leads a club of kids who idolize classic monster movies; they get Van Helsing's diary, written in German, and take it to an elderly neighbor they call the Scary German Guy for translation. From the diary they learn what the amulet is and how it might be used against the monsters. Sean's little sister Phoebe, kept out of the club, meets Frankenstein's Monster, who is reluctant to serve the count.
Cast
- Brent Chalemas Horace
- Ryan Lambertas Rudy
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Monster Squad (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Duncan Regehr narrowly beat a then little known Liam Neeson for the role of Dracula; Neeson was still supposed to appear as a human disguise conjured by Dracula to conceal his identity, but that scene was never shot.
- While putting the finishing touches to his debut Night of the Creeps, Dekker asked his friend and roommate Shane Black to turn the pitch into a screenplay; Black's first draft ran 150 to 160 pages with epic scenes that would have sent the picture overbudget, and Dekker trimmed it to about 100.
- After his breakthrough as a serial killer in Manhunter, Tom Noonan chose this film over Near Dark for its more lighthearted nature; Kathryn Bigelow was persistent and showed up on set to work out an early release with the producers so he could do both, but she was turned down.
- The Gillman suit, made by Matt Rose and studio newcomer Steve Wang, came to be viewed as a milestone in creature costumes, and on the strength of it the pair were entrusted with building a similar suit on short notice for Predator.
- The film was cut by 13 minutes by producers who did not want it to run more than 90 minutes; according to Dekker its brevity was largely due to Hyams, who felt that trimming subplots like Sean's parents' marital issues would make the film more tonally consistent.
- The film was marketed through posters designed to look like "Wanted" police placards, with a main poster carrying the Ghostbusters-inspired slogan "You know who to call when you have ghosts. But who do you call when you have monsters?"
- Actor Brent Chalem did not get to witness the film's popular resurgence, having met an untimely death from pneumonia in 1997, at the age of 22.
