I know I'll get rapped in the mouth for this but one reason I think MONSTER SQUAD failed was because it was exactly what it more or less set out to be: juvenile. I was in my later teens when I saw it, and so very open to wanting a success, but even I found it regrettable when I walked out the theater. It does have some good elements and the heart was in the right place, but the brain...not so much. I found it guilty of the exact crime against the original monsters that A&CmF has long been wrongly accused of committing. Also, having Dracula call the little girl what he did (even though, when you think about it, that and far worse would be perfectly true to his utterly depraved character) was just way too jarring a disconnect in that setting, contrasted with the too-adolescent-by-half bulk of the film. Just one monster kid's opinion.

Addendum: I'm not sure they can be successfully updated. That is...setting such characters in the modern world, which would be the likely move, always tends to make them too much a product of our times or too much like us, which wrecks the whole thing. Those monsters simply cannot exist as we've enjoyed them in our modern world.

Other attempts, smartly detecting this error and wanting to avoid it, veer too far off into new and novel directions, which rarely works because the result is TOO disconnected from the original inspiration.

The only new take on the classic monsters I think even came close to working was the recent Wolf Man film. That is probably as close as we're going to get to "updating" the monsters while remaining true to them, and so should serve as the model for future efforts, imo.

Last Edited By: countplastica Aug 16 13 6:17 PM. Edited 1 times.