Director/Co-Writer Frank Dekker. Image Copyright(C) Movie Jungle International, INC. This image may not be used or duplicated elsewhere without express written permission.

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We had a seat with the stars and director of “Monster Squad.” With the release of the 20th Anniversary Edition DVD on July 24th, the film which has achieved a cult-status with many eager fans reminiscing the horror comedy of their youth, is now enjoying a great resurrection.

MovieJungle.com spoke to director/co-writer Fred Dekker and actors Andrew Gower, Ashley Bank and Ryan Lambert.

Fred Dekker:

He talks about Monster Squad’s original release, trying to find a market and more:
“Teenagers and adults thought it was a kids movie, kids couldn’t go because their parents thought it would be too scary for them so we ended up with no audience. I think the kids roughly the age of Squad started to catch up on it on cable and then they sort of grew this affection for it and they started renting it. It just sort of started to accrue this good will and this nostalgia. I knew the film really worked with an audience because whenever we showed it to people they really responded, the problem was getting them into the seats in the first place.”

Who’s changed the most? (kind of silly question since Ashley Bank was only five at the time but anyhow)

“Obviously that would be Ashley Bank who plays Phoebe because she was five-years-old when we made the movie, now she’s this delightful young lady with breasts.” *laughter*
He continues “…and a sense of great sense of humor. But they haven’t changed these kids. Ryan Lambert who I always maintained the reason that we cast him was…you know Rudy in the movie was supposed to be the cool kid and he was genuinely cool at the time. I mean, he came in to audition for the part and my co-writer Shane Black was smoking at the time, I don’t know if he still does but his cigarettes were sitting there and Ryan came in at I think thirteen at the time and said ‘Hey, can I bum a smoke?’ and Shane gave him a cigarette and we sort of thought ‘You know, this kid probably is right for the part.’ He’s still cool today, he has a rock band called Elephone. But other than that they really haven’t changed much.”

He talks about genres and mixing and matching.

“I’ve always loved blending genres. I get really bored when something is kind of the same thing all the way through, you know dramas that are just kind of creaky and dramatic. I like horror films and I like moments of poignance or drama in my comedies and so this was a great opportunity to kind of walk that tight rope.
 It’s a genre movie which has historically not succeeded. I think American Werewolf in London succeeds, I think Abbott Costello Meet Frankenstein succeeds but it’s a real uneasy tightrope balance to do. The audiences can get easily confused, they kind of wanna laugh or they wanna be scared…they get confused sometimes when you ask them to do both in the same movie.
What’s good about this movie is that people who saw this movie when they were young that are now old enough to have kids are showing it to their kids. The movie for me was very much a tribute to my own youth; my misspent hours in front of a TV watching ‘Little Rascals’ watching the universal horror movies.” He ends with “I’m hoping it stands the test of time for young and old.”

I ask about the DVD, the deleted scenes and an interview with Frankenstein.

“That’s just a goof [the interview] that Tom Noonan [Frankenstein] did for a TV show back then. The deleted scenes turned out to be less than we thought they were. I actually pulled them out of my archives, they’re very short scenes, most of them having to do with the marital difficulties between the parents in the movie, the Stephen Macht and Mary Ellen Trainor characters.
There is a whole section of the movie that we shot…we don’t know where it is…” *laughter* “…which is a section from the prologue where Van Helsing and his minions…you’ll notice at the beginning of the movie they’re there to find Dracula but then they just find the amulet and Dracula sort of disappears? Well, they actually found him and staked him and we shot that scene and I don’t know for the life of me where that is! But the truth of the matter is that if a prologue of a movie goes on too long the audience starts to go ‘Is this the movie?’ and then if you cut to the present day they’re going to go ‘Hey! What happened to that other movie?’ So Peter Hyams, our producer was fairly adamant that we keep the prologue you know, as short as possible.”

Next Dekker talks the about the Commentary

“They’re very different. The one with the cast is just Andre Gower, Ryan Lambert, Ashley Bank and myself kind of getting toasted in New Jersey and watching the movie and just having a good time. The commentary with Bradford May, the cinematographer is much more scholarly and no drinks there except for coffee.”

Ashley Bank:

She’s asked what it’s like to see all the folks again.

“Oh, it’s so great! It’s kind of like a big high school reunion except that I was five at the time. Now I get to see everybody again, it’s great, it’s kind of like being back in the Squad.”
I ask her what she remembers since she was so young at the time.
“Most of my memories are really specifically of filming. I remember almost all of the filming we did. I remember a little bit of life of set but probably not nearly as vivid as the rest of these guys.”

I carry on with whether anything scared her at that age (five)

“I was terrified of Dracula! Terrified…I would not stand…I could not be around him! I would go ‘He’s there? I’m there.’ Which kind of worked because the monsters were kind of aloof from us anyway. They did spend a lot of time less on set, a lot of that was I think because our hours were so limited on how we can shoot that they did a lot of stuff with the monsters, even scenes where we were with them…their coverage was done without us. They would shoot our stuff and then send us on our and then get their stuff.”

She’s asked if she gets recognized…err after so many years?…moving on…

Naturally the answer is “Never. Never. Well I mean you know, it’s been twenty years. My face is really similar but I think I look a lot different…a little bit right? A smidge! I would hope that I’m not this little five-year-old midget walking around who just like looks like she’s twenty six?”

A question comes up about how many drinks she had during the audio commentary.

“No comment!” *she laughs* “Quite a lot! I actually haven’t listened to it yet…umm. I got the DVD a couple of days ago and I watched the featurette which was so lovely. I thought they did a fantastic job but I haven’t had a just to watch the commentary yet.”

She’s produced a short called “Jinx!” this year. I ask about that.

“It’s a dark comedy about these two grade school girls and one of them gets jinxed, like when you speak at the same time and so the other one thinks she can’t talk. It’s like it damages her and she never speaks again until she’s like old and she meets this woman again and gets unjinxed. It was fun, I love producing. A friend of mine from college was like ‘Hey I want to make this! I read the script and thought it was really cute. I think we sold it to IFC.”

I ask if she gets any fan mail.

“Yeah, I get a lot of people contacting me via MySpace, which is so funny. I had like thirty friends that I knew then all of a sudden I just started getting lots of messages and come across people going ‘I love this movie, will you have me as you friend!’ I think I have like five hundred friends right now. I think that probably you know, ninety percent of them are Monster Squad fans.”

(l-r) Andre Gower and Ryan Lambert. Image Copyright(C) Movie Jungle International, INC. This image may not be used or duplicated elsewhere without express written permission.

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Ryan Lambert:

He’s asked about the DVD

“Interesting to hear everybody’s perspective on what their experience was making the film.”

And yours was?

“Horrific! It was totally fine! It was great we had a good time…I don’t remember.” He says jokingly. *laughter*
You don’t remember at all?
“I do. I remember clips and pieces and things like that. It was an amazing experience, there’s a lot of stories that probably aren’t true and I remember things that probably never happened. I remember the overall experience being WOW an incredible time and we were all kind of sad when it ended.”

Can you talk about being recognized?

“Well” *clears throat* “…the movie is recognized, I don’t feel like I’m recognized. It has nothing to do with me. It’s like an ensemble thing and the movie is…everyone’s a big fan of the film. I’m sure everyone has their favorite characters but I think it’s amazing. I had no idea that this thing was happening, that this thing was brewing this whole time. So I was surprised when I got a call to go down to Austin and do a screening in Austin. I was like ‘For what?’ and they were like ‘Monster Squad.’ I was like ‘What? You watched that?’ Everybody’s watched it…I was like yeah right. So it was kind of weird.”

He’s asked about deleted scenes.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet. I know there are scenes that I shot that aren’t in the film so I don’t know that they made the DVD or whatever. There’s like an extended scene with Lisa Fuller, that blonde girl that I had a crush on in the film, it was an extended scene with her and I and at the end of the film after all the hoopla’s already happened, we kind of talk and see that we’re probably gonna hook it up, you know? But I’ve never seen that footage, so it’s probably gone. Or maybe that was in my head? I don’t know…” *he laughs*
“The commentary was fun; the four of us watched it in our hotel room in New Jersey. I think we could have gone a little farther and deeper into it you know? But things go by so fast. You watch the film and you want to say so much, there’s probably a lot more that could have been said.”

He talks about filming.

“There were times when it was fun and then there were times when we were like ‘Ok, we gotta get serious, you gotta stake this vampire b#tch and we want you to look like you staking a vampire b#tch and want you to be scared. Things like that are kind of hard to be scared of…I was fifteen, I was the oldest of the kids, none of the monsters scared me at all. I knew that they were actors. I could differentiate between the two.”

Ashley Bank. Image Copyright(C) Movie Jungle International, INC. This image may not be used or duplicated elsewhere without express written permission.

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Andre Gower:

He’s asked about the film’s cult status and resurfacing.

“I think I had a little bit more exposure to it than Ryan did because he’s just not that associated with it, but for some reason it’s never really gone away. Most of my fans never really disappear, they just had nowhere really to go and last year when we did that first screening in Texas it really like oh wow! There is an outlet, they’re doing stuff, let’s jump on it and now it’s going to blow up. That’s what happened almost a year and a half ago. It’s really the fans enthusiasm and energy that actually…that’s why we had a DVD.”

A question on the commentary.

“That was cool because we had been together at a couple of the cast screenings across the country and then we actually did the commentary for the DVD in the spring or something or late winter. It was neat to sit around and crack up and be together and actually talk about it. That was neat. That was a neat thing to do. We weren’t expecting to do a cast commentary for the Monster Squad DVD.”

I comment about Stan Winston Studio and the effects.

“Yeah when you think of it now and going back everybody knows these guys and these were the industry leaders of their respective fields of craft and we had big time producers, we had big time sound and scoring and music and visual effects and creature effects. I mean, the makeup stuff that you just don’t do like you did back then so that’s something to hold on to that I actually think is one of the cooler things, you know.”

He’s asked about the fact that filmmakers advise not to work with kids and this movie being filled with kids.

“I would agree that some people shouldn’t work with kids, not because they’re kids, because they can’t work with kids; that’s their problem. I think we had someone who completely understood like on a Spielbergian level, who just knew how to bring out something in each one of us, knew the characters and lived with them for however long. He just knew what he was doing from day one and we loved him, he was like big brother…he was like A big brother not THE big brother.”

Trailer for The Monster Squad