Here We Are Hanging Onto Strains Of Green And Blues

Squad Deep with Andre & Ryan: The Goonies / The Monster Squad
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
Last night, the Mahoning Drive-In Theater featured one of my favorite movies of all time, along with a second movie which was the focal point of the event.

The weekend is centered around the horror comedy The Monster Squad.  The 1987 film is screening on both Friday and Saturday night from what is believed to be the only 35mm print that still exists today.  In addition to this incredibly rare screening, we were joined on the lot by two actors from the film: Andre Gower, who stars in the movie as Sean Crenshaw, and Ryan Lambert, who plays the leather jacket wearing bad boy of the film, Rudy Holloran.

The Big Kid Store were one of the vendors on the lot on Friday night, and they hosted a Goonies-themed scavenger hunt.  This was similar to the one that they held for the screening of Clue on June 9th.  Folks were given a treasure map and had to hunt around the lot looking for six stations that had a colored ink stamper attached to stamp your map.  Once you've obtained all six stamps, you'd turn your map in to the folks at The Big Kid Store table for a raffle ticket to win a prize pack.  We didn't end up getting the winning ticket, but the scavenger hunt was a heck of a lot of fun!

The Goonies is my favorite kids movie ever made, and its firmly in my top ten of favorite movies of all time.  We saw it at the Mahoning two years ago and it was an incredible experience, and this time was just as great.  They could show this movie once a year and I'd come out to see it every time and be just as excited as the first time I ever saw it.

I could go on for several paragraphs of gushing over how much I love The Goonies, I'm going to skip ahead to talk about the second half of this double feature because it was a movie that I got to see for the very first time last night.

The second movie of Friday night was The Monster Squad.  I was seven years old when this premiered in theaters, which means I probably would have been around 8 or 9 when it was released on home video.  I was also a big fan of horror movies as a child, just as I am today.  However, not only have I never seen The Monster Squad before last night, but I had never even heard of it until fairly recently.  I don't ever recall seeing the trailer on television, or hearing any of my friends from school talking about it, or even seeing a poster or the VHS tape box at a rental store.

Virgil hyped this film up as a cult-classic and a must-see 80's flick, so I was looking forward to seeing it.  I was even more excited when I learned that the 35mm print that was being shown on the big screen at the Mahoning is the only one known to exist, and that two of the stars from the movie would be joining us on the lot and would take part in a pre-show Q&A.  I was all set to have my mind blown by an 80's gem that had somehow eluded me all of these years and to have my first experience of it be on 35mm at a drive-in theater, just as moviegoers would have experienced it 37 years ago when it was first released.

So... I tend to be able to find something that I enjoy about pretty much every movie I see, even if it's not necessarilly my cup of tea.  I'm not going to say that there was nothing enjoyable about The Monster Squad because it had a few moments that were mildly amusing, but I think this was pretty lousy overall and not in a "so bad it's good" kind of way.  The story was sloppy and disjointed with acting performances that felt like they came from rejected Are You Afraid Of The Dark audition tapes.  The script seemed like with was written with the primary goal of having child actors piss off the parents in the audience.  I'm not at all offended by kids cursing, or smoking, or firing guns, or any of the other things that happened in this movie.  It was just done in such a way that made it painfully obvious that they were going for the whole "your parents don't want you to see this" vibe.  There really wasn't any heart in the film at all.  The attempts at humor came across as lame, and the plot was an hot mess.  Really, the only thing I can praise is that the monster costumes and makeup were quite good.  I honestly wish I felt differently and that I could get as hyped up by the whole "wolfman has nards" schtick as the fans of this movie seem to get, but I'd only be faking it.  This one isn't for me.

It has been suggested that I would have felt differently if I had seen this for the first time when I was a kid, but I strongly doubt it.  There have been plenty of movies geared towards kids and teenagers that I enjoyed despite not seeing them until well into my adult life.  Little Monsters, Good Burger, Heavyweights, Angus, and The Sandlot come to mind as examples because, like The Monster Squad, I got to see them at the Mahoning.  It could be that the movie was just plain overhyped and didn't live up to the lofty expectations that were set by the folks who talked to me about it beforehand.  It's also possible that it looked bad to me because it screened immediately after my favorite kids movie of all time and it paled in comparison.  That last point seems to be the most fair to me.  Watching a double feature of The Goonies and The Monster Squad felt to me like eating a delicious steak and baked potato for dinner followed by a handful of stale Pez dug out of the bottom of your grandmother's purse for dessert.

They're screening The Monster Squad again tonight, followed by a digital presentation of It: Chapter One.  With all due respect to Bill Skarsgård's performance as Pennywise The Clown, this may be the easiest night on the calendar for me to skip.  I'm not a big fan of the gimmick where they screen the same movie two days in a row with a different co-feature even if I like the repeated movie, but for something like The Monster Squad, you'd have a hard time convincing me to see it two days in a row even if the tickets were free.