Fred Dekker

I have not seen this one.

And that's a 1987 Fred Decker film, The Monster Squad.

So I'm looking forward to seeing what I make of this one, Keith.

I'm sure you've seen it numerous times.

If you watch her, you watch this, and you watch the reboot directed by Robert Zemeckis, of all things.

Who wrote that? Did Fred Decker write that episode, too? Decker wrote it, yeah.

Yeah.

And Sylvester, it's basically like a reunion of Back to the Future.

I don't know.

I know that the only way I think you could possibly do it is do the format that Tales from the Crypt did and not necessarily have a singular voice but have a multitude of voices and have different creative people come in like Tim Burton or, you know, you could have Sam Raimi.

You could have different directors introducing their own DNA to it because Twilight Zone was so singularly Rod Serling and his – ethos that's true but but Tales from the Crypt doesn't have that limitation it's literally everybody so everybody gets to contribute and you have all these great people and I keep we keep talking about Fred Decker but Fred Decker is one of those guys that never really he never really did better than his movies in the 80s and he's such a talented writer but his career basically ended with um RoboCop 3.

That was a

I went to Rock Island, Illinois, last night to screen Night of the Creeps.

Fred Decker.

Yes, exactly.

And I DJed before and after the movie and gave a little brief introduction.

Yeah, it's just wild how it all sort of connects.

I mean, even, you know, this Halloween, I'm probably going to watch some of Fred Decker's movies like The Monster Squad and Night of the Creeps.

But he's clearly influenced by these older movies.

Oh, yeah.

And it's fascinating because I think Forrest Ackerman with Famous Monsters of Filmland, I think that that created this like tight knit fandom and everyone grew up and even got involved in Hollywood.

And then they pass this on.

It's like they do updated versions, you know, like Fred Decker would homage these older films he maybe read about in Famous Monsters.

And then, you know, it keeps evolving.

And these are just some of the writers.

You got Walter Hill, Fred Decker, Terry Black.

The producers, A.L. Katz and Gilbert Adler ended up writing a bunch of them of the show.

And then directors, Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, Richard Donner, Tom Holland, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And then producer was Sean S. Cunningham from the Friday the 13th franchise.

And then you had Fred Dekker, who wrote Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad.

This was a who's who.

It's totally incongruous, 'cause you have these, like, big time horror honchos behind the scenes, and then in front of the camera are all of these essentially sitcom stars.

So before we get into the plot, let's, let's go over some of the basic information for Monster Squad.

Obviously, the title is Monster Squad, directed by Fred Dekker, uh, I think a horror legend in his own right for sure, is, with this movie alone.

Writers, okay, Fred Dekker wrote the script along with Shane Black, so this is pretty huge.

Shane Black also wrote m- things like The Last Boy Scout, Lethal Weapon, you know, uh, uh, uh, you know, he's, he's really one of the more prominent writers to, like, come out, especially during that time, and especially when you think about people who sold spec scripts.

I think he was one of the first, if not the first, to have, like, a million dollar script or something like that.

Mm-hmm

...

Fred Dekker and Shane Black clearly knew the genre very, very well and the mythology very, very well.

And so I kinda just scrolled down until I saw a movie that I wanted to watch, and this was a movie that I watch every year 'cause there were so many that I could have watched, uh, picked from, from their list.

But I watched the great 1987 hit, The Monster Squad, directed by Fred Decker, starring Andre Gower, Robbie Kiger, Steven Macht, Duncan Regehr, Tom Noonan, Mary Eli- Ellen Trainor, John Grei- Grise, and Stan Shaw.

And of course, a lot of these are just familiar faces.

You may not know 'em by name.