Writer-director Shane Black is probably most well known for action-comedies like Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and, most recently, The Nice Guys.
But, for a generation of horror fans, he will always be the man who gave us The Monster Squad.
The 1987 film, which saw a group of friends battling classic monsters such as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf-Man, Goonies-style, didn’t make much of an impact upon its initial release.
However, the flick has gained an impressive cult following over the past thirty years, thanks in large part to genre fans, who were growing up in the late-eighties to early-nineties, getting behind it in a big way.
In a recent interview with IGN, Black hinted that he may be up for doing a sequel, with the kids having appropriately aged in the intervening years. Unfortunately, there’s already a pretty significant movie (with a remake on the way) that deals with that kind of subject matter:
When you say the kids are grown up the first thing I go to is the movie, or the book really, It by Stephen King, which is about kids who fight monsters when they’re young, then as grown-ups they’re sort of beckoned and they have to return to their childhood hometown. And I think that’s kind of close… I don’t know how you would distance yourself from that
When pressed, Black revealed that the best way around this little stumbling block might be to remake The Monster Squad in the present day, with all that entails:
It would be interesting to have two movies – one The Monster Squad, and [ANOTHER WHERE] they’re 30 years apart and so are the kids; the characters have aged. As long as people understood that’s what we’re doing, I think that could be fun
It’s difficult to say which path would suit the premise better, drowning as we are in remakes and reboots and re-imaginings.
Would these characters be better off left alone? Is it more interesting to pass the torch on to a new group of kids, to have their own adventures? Should Black do an all-female version?
Only time will tell. Stay tuned to Wicked Horror for more on this story as it develops.
