Critic Reviews
61
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
8(57%)
mixed
5(36%)
negative
1(7%)
Showing 14 Critic Reviews
91
Fred Dekker’s 1987 horror comedy is, like totally, the ultimate ’80s movie. An agreeably goofy, Little Rascals-meets-The Goonies time passer, the movie is proudly anti-CGI.
80
Sharper than a stake in it's genre references, The Monster Squad appeals to cinephile as well as teen sensibilities.
80
The film paints a nostalgic portrait of the fears we all shared as children - the common knowledge that when our parents left the room, the monsters under our beds - or locked inside our closest - started to shift and scratch; that our only friend in the midnight hour was the nightlight in the corner of the room.
80
The Monster Squad is such fun, it makes you wish you were a kid again.
80
It’s every kids dream to fight monsters, and in some ways The Monster Squad helps us live out that fantasy. And it’s a damn good film chalk full of horror movie references, and nods to classic films that only the discernible eye can catch.
75
Squad joins The Lost Boys, Fright Night, Gremlins, and Poltergeist in a winning '80s subgenre dedicated to ghoulies invading the suburbs.
75
The Monster Squad is schoolyard-clever and cut to the rhythms of Saturday morning TV, within which limitations it's actually a lot of fun. It's a swell movie for kids under 13. [20 Aug 1987, p.C8]
70
More of a clever comic parody than a jokey pastiche, this lively kiddies' horror pic delivers frights and laughs which are rooted in a sure and sympathetic grasp of Monster Movie mythology.
50
A silly attempt to crossbreed an Our Gang comedy with a classic horror film, which usually means that both genres have reached the end of the line.
50
Most of what's included in this unapologetically scrambled mixture of Goonies, Hardy Boys adventures, Ghostbusters and Abbott and Costello monster films is bad actors wandering around in bad makeup and rubber masks and two kinds of kids -- cute, intolerably noisy, smart-alecky kids and not-so-cute, noisy, smart-alecky kids. I don't know which kind I liked least.
