Little Monsters (1989).
The Stage.
After moving into a new house, a twelve-year old discovers a world of monsters under his bed that has no rules…but while pulling pranks all night might seem like fun at first, things quickly get out of control.
The Review.
I’m continuing to comb through my physical media shelves to weed out those discs that don’t deserve a spot in my library. My wife wanted to watch something this night, so I pulled out a few unwatched discs and we landed on Little Monsters from Lionsgate’s Vestron disc line. So, why is this on my shelf? Well, I actually bought this disc by accident because I was stoned one night and thought I was buying the Shane Black/Fred Dekker classic The Monster Squad…but I wasn’t about to return it, because the cover had Fred Savage and a big blue monster on it, and if there’s one thing that you can put money on, it’s that kids movies in the late 80’s were always way more fucked up than they should have been, so I had to check it out.
In short, this is a combination of Monster Inc. and Drop Dead Fred, and if that sounds terrifying, it is. The film starts with a moving truck being unloaded as the Stevenson family moves into their new place in the suburbs. Fred Savage plays Brian, a twelve year old kid who is really taking the move hard. He misses his friends, his school, and his old house. He’s having trouble making friends in his new town, which honestly isn’t too surprising when you see him sneak out of bed to make himself a peanut butter and raw onion sandwich for a midnight snack. His brother, Eric, is played by his real life brother, Ben Savage in his first role. The dad is played by Daniel Stern, who coincidentally played the older, narrator version of Fred Savage’s Kevin Arnold in The Wonder Years, and his wife in the film is played by Margaret Whitton, who had a pretty good run on TV shows and in the first two Major League films.
Long story short, there’s some monkey business going on in the Stevenson household, and Brian finds out that the mischief is being caused by a monster who crawls out from under the bed at night. His name is Maurice, played by Howie Mandell. He’s blue, has horns, and wears a leather vest. He convinces Brian to come check out his world, which is every kid’s dream. It’s like Outback Steakhouse down there - no rules, just right. You want pizza? Grab a slice. You want to play video games all night? Go for it. You want to climb up into someone’s room and ruin their fucking life? More on that later. There’s one catch though - if you’re in the monster world when the sun rises, you’re trapped below and become a monster yourself, and the world isn’t as great as it might seem, because we find out that it’s run by a terrifying weirdo simply named “The Boy”.
I mentioned before that PG movies in the late 80’s were always kind of twisted and this movie does not disappoint. The creature designs are really creepy. Maurice has sharp teeth and looks pretty unsettling but once Brian is dragged into the underworld, there are all kinds of frightening creatures. One even has his face melted off at one point, revealing a green Krang looking thing behind the skin. It’s genuinely disturbing. There are also some deep themes here, including a kidnapping, and since it was an 80’s kids movie, divorce. And the language, oh, the language. After encountering the underworld boss’s number one enforcer, Maurice says, “Once he grew that hunchback he became a real bitch.” We also get a few holy shits, a dick, and a ton of hells and a lot of damns. To be clear, I’m not offended by language, but it amazes me that I could have rented this when I was 8 years old and it would have been just fine. It really extends it’s PG rating.
The End.
There’s a lot to like about Little Monsters. I thought it dealt with really heavy issues in a pretty mature way. The kids weren’t stupid and get themselves out of jams (that felt like they had actual stakes) by using their brains. I also thought the relationships seemed genuine, which can be hard to get right in a kids movie. And the creature designs were great. The weak link here is really tough to overlook though, and that’s the character of Maurice. He’s a Beetlejuice knockoff, but Howie Mandell doesn’t have the chops to handle the role in a way that gives him any personality outside of just being really annoying (even his character design was annoying because he had so much metal shit hanging off of his face and jacket that it was constantly jingling and jangling), and he never felt like a monster you’d want to trust no matter how close the script wanted he and Brian to be. The detriment is very clear during a moment at the end of the film that could have been a real tearjerker with a better actor in the role. Robin Williams would have been amazing.
I also think I would have enjoyed the movie a lot more if it didn’t seem so mean spirited. Part of this has to do with Fred Savage just kind of always portraying his character as smug and smarmy - he’s just not cute enough to pull off the sympathy needed, but the other part is because Brian and Maurice cause a lot of damage and it’s not just innocent fun. There’s a scene in which they sneak into a girls room and because of the film’s uneven tone and Maurice’s hints at a sexual appetite, I was kind of nervous about the threat of sexual assault - luckily it didn’t go that route. It does, however, feature a scene in which Maurice and Brian sneak into Buzz from Home Alone’s kitchen and replace his apple juice with fresh, warm piss, a stunt that strayed from being amusing to being outright vile. This felony and those like it are played for laughs of course, culminating with a scene of kids being yelled at by their furious parents, but I just felt sorry for them. Some of these kids were probably shipped off to military school, for God’s sake. It doesn’t help that neither of the actual culprits ever have to own up to the damage they’ve done and it’s just kind of chocked up to mischief.
So, the thirteen dollar question here - does this belong in the collection? You know what? I’m going to hang onto this one. This is a nasty fever dream straight from the bottom of Oscar the Grouch’s trash can that was made during an age in which kids films trusted kids to deal with stuff that was kind of dark and pretty scary. I think parents these days have become weenies, but I’m proudly putting myself in that camp. It’s compelling enough to make me want to show my kid, but that won’t happen until he’s like fifteen - just because kids movies were able to scar me as a child doesn’t mean I want my kid to be scarred by them.
The Vestron disc looks really good and has a surprising amount of special features, including new interviews, vintage interviews, and a feature length commentary. The highlight is an interview with an eight-year-old Ben Savage that takes place outside of an abandoned cement factory. He was just cute as a button back then and talks about how his brother helped him out on-set.
