By Sam Devine
So the City just killed Halloween (although, in all fairness, they had plenty of help from a few masked assailants and some assorted weaponry), but there may be hope for the haunted holiday yet. As long as you’ve got a DVD player.
What is surely the funniest and most watch-able monster movie of all time, “The Monster Squad,” (originally released in 1987) has just been dubbed a “cult classic,” and been re-released on DVD. In it, all the old-school Universal movie monsters – Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein’s Monster – return to claim a sacred amulet that can forever alter the balance of power between good and evil. And a group of Junior High kids are the only ones that remember the special ways to kill these monsters.
(Sound silly? All right hotshot: how many ways are there to kill a Werewolf? Would an accident with power tools do it? What about falling out of a window – onto a bomb? Isn’t a silver bullet the only way? The really silly thing is that a lot of us carry around arcane monster knowledge. Hell, the president couldn’t find his ass with a map, but it’s a safe bet he can help you out with your Werewolf problem: “See, whatcha do is… you get a silver bullet. It’s like the reverse of Iraq, heh. see. Where there is no silver bullet. Heh. Learned that from my buddy Lon Chaney – I call ‘im Lonny, heh, for short.”)