YMMV / The Monster Squad

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Allegedly why the film took a while to find its audience. Adults perceived it as a kid's movie and parents thought it was too scary to let their kids see.
• Cliché Storm: The movie is a nice little time capsule of tropes from 80s live-action kids movies.
• Cult Classic: The film bombed out in theaters, but was eventually "discovered" through cable networks and home video.
• Designated Hero: The Squad blackmailing a girl with a nude photo of her isn't exactly something that screams "hero."
• Evil Is Cool: Fans of the film enjoy Duncan Regehr's portrayal of Dracula as a fitting continuation of the character's iconic portrayals by Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi, being classy and refined while also being fairly badass and scary (ironically, in the original novel by Bram Stoker, pretty much everybody who encounters Dracula in person finds him to be disturbing and creepy).
• Fridge Logic: When the team is forming the Monster Squad and putting their hands together in circle formation followed by their pet beagle's paw, Rudy asks "How does that dog get up here, anyway?"
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In this movie, there's a cheesy horror franchise named "Groundhog Day", which the father criticizes for being extremely repetitive. In a few years, a film by the same name would become a very well-regarded romantic comedy (albeit a supernatural one), which is about things being extremely repetitive.
    • And now there's a horror film with a similar premise to that of Groundhog Day, bringing things full circle.
  • This is probably going to be the best Dark Universe movie to date.
• Magnificent Bastard: Count Dracula is a wickedly smart vampire who seeks a mythical amulet to plunge the world in darkness and reign supreme. Hiding out for a century after Abraham Van Helsing’s botched attempt to defeat him, Dracula summons his gang of monsters to help him track down the amulet. Going under the name Alucard, Dracula’s able to find the amulet in the mansion he rented out, and when the Monster Squad storm his castle and steal it from him, Dracula retaliates by destroying their treehouse lair and unleashing his monsters all throughout town. Undeterred in his quest for the amulet, even after his plans have been foiled despite coming so close to achieving them, Dracula still tries to take Sean with him as he’s being sucked inside the wormhole.
• Memetic Mutation: "Wolfman's got nards!" (it even became the name of the decades-later documentary).
• Moral Event Horizon: Sure, Dracula has always been pure evil — but in all his incarnations, has he ever done anything as evil as tossing a stick of dynamite into a child's treehouse? Or threaten to snap a little girl's neck? And calling her a bitch to her face to boot?
• Nightmare Fuel: Dracula is played quite scary for a kids' movie, particularly in his Terminator-esque Unflinching Walk in the climax. The character even terrified the young actors. Phoebe's screaming reaction to being snarled at by actor Duncan Regeher was the young actress's genuine reaction.
• Retroactive Recognition: "Uncle Rico's got nards!" Yes, that is indeed Jon Gries playing the Wolfman's human form.
• Spiritual Adaptation: In his video, Minty Comedic Arts said it could be considered the first unofficial movie adaptation to Stephen King's It with a similar group of kids going up against monsters.
• Spiritual Predecessor: Structurally, possibly to Stranger Things. One of the Duffer Brothers said in the pre-season 1 interviews that all the different 'groupings' of main characters were in a different type of movie: Hopper was in a government conspiracy thriller, Joyce was in a paranormal drama, Jonathan, Nancy and Steve were in a classic John Hughes movie with SlasherFilm undertones, and Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Eleven were in a Steven Spielberg -style coming of age movie - until they all start to collide and intersect in the third act. Looked at that way, The Monster Squad is similar: the Squad is a 'those meddling kids' story fused with Hammer Horror; Del and his partner Sapir are world-weary cops in a police procedural, becoming an occult detective story; Emily thinks she's in a Tearjerker drama about the breakdown of a marriage; Patrick's sister Lisa certainly acts like she's the lead in a John Hughes movie!
  • Also seems to be one to Van Helsing.
• Spiritual Successor: Minty Comedic Arts argued that it could be seen as a successor to The Goonies with a similar group of kids, Frankenstein's monster being Sloth and Mary Ellen Trainor playing a mom in both movies.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The poor girls who became Dracula's brides. The fact that the Squad don't seem to pity them as much they do the Wolfman is also a bit tragic.
  • Frank gets sucked into the wormhole to stop Dracula for good, while Phoebe tries to save him and begs him not to leave.
  • Wolfman sincerely thanking Rudy as he lays dying from the silver bullet Rudy shot him with. Also, how utterly frantic the guy'd been to get himself locked up at the police station.
  • The reveal of "Scary German Guy"'s backstory as a Holocaust survivor.
• Values Dissonance: Applies to Designated Hero above and Kids Are Cruel on the main page, the boys make fat-shaming cracks about their friend "Fat Kid", homophobic jokes, and pretty much behave like sexist jerks; all traits that would mark characters as villains or as flawed heroes, whose Jerkass behavior is acknowledged by the story.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: All of the classic Universal Monsters are given an 80s upgrade in their costumes via Stan Winston, and they're all fantastic to witness. Special mention goes to the Gill Man, whose costume is considered one of the best visual depictions of the character to this day.
• The Woobie: The Wolfman's human form. He's an innocent man who doesn't want to hurt anyone and wants to die so he can be freed from his curse and keep himself from hurting others. He's kept and tortured in his human form by Dracula, and tries desperately to stop himself in order to spare the kids, calling one of their fathers to warn him after he's unable to get the police to shoot him with a silver bullet or lock him up. When he's shot by Rudy, he reverts back to human form and uses his last seconds of life to thank him for ending his suffering.