By 1989, family friendly fantasy fare was in a weird transitional phase. The bleary-eyed E.T./Harry and the Hendersons era of sentimental, Spielbergian wonder was drying up, and the darker, more kinetic Roal Dahl-esque wave of the ’90s (The Witches, The Addams Family, Hocus Pocus, Drop Dead Fred, Toys) hadn’t fully taken over yet.
Little Monsters sits awkwardly on the middle of the shelf – a movie that wanted to be Beetlejuice but never quite figured out how.
The nuts and bones of Little Monsters feel very close to a typical 80s kids’ power-fantasy adventure with hidden worlds to explore, but our hero comes with that all-too familiar (to our generation anyway) surly latchkey kid energy instead of the usual Spielbergian “aw shucks” wonder child. It’s something Labirynth captured pretty well just a couple years prior. But it also has one foot in the ’90s – gross-out gags, mean-spirited edge, and a world that’s less magical than it is kind of nasty.
Fred Savage, arguably the biggest child star of the era not named Culkin, carries the movie on his usual brand of theatre-kid charisma, but it’s Maurice, the blue-skinned imp played by Howie Mandel, who sticks to the roof of your memory. Mandel’s performance is the most ’90s thing about this movie: a rapid-fire, pop-culture-referencing, Animaniac energy that predates The Mask or Genie from Aladdin. Maurice mostly exists to cause problems on purpose.
He’s a monster in a land where kids eventually turn into creatures, and that’s the hard lesson of Little Monsters: the implication that childhood is just a holding pattern before the inevitable descent into a monstrous aldulthood.
I think my favourite nod is Daniel Stern, playing Fred’s dad – a nice connection to The Wonder Years, where he narrated Savage’s childhood. But unlike that show’s nostalgic glow, Stern’s role here reflects a bitter reality for us 80s kids.
This is divorce movie, but instead of magical reconciliation, the parents just stay miserable for most of the runtime. No suburban wish-fulfillment before the credits roll.
Vestron was already circling the drain by the time this movie hit. They’d spent years dishing out quality video schlock, but after producing Dirty Dancing, they proved they could also stumble onto a megahit. Little Monsters was their big attempt at a kids’ movie, but even as a PG-rated fantasy, it had the same grimy, VHS-rental-store-after-dark energy as their horror output. It was one of its last gasps before Vestron collapsed and was absorbed into the corporate-raiding void.
Little Monsters was never quite as beloved as it clearly set out to be, but it lingers under the Pop cultural bed. It’s not as slick as Beetlejuice, Goonies or Monster Squad, but it’s a fascinating mutation – one last vestige of the dirty, weird, half-dangerous era of kids’ movies before they took on that distinctly 90s Nick&Diz flavour. -Pop