INTERVIEW: Relive those ‘Monster Squad’ memories with new doc ‘Wolfman’s Got Nards’
Image courtesy of Gravitas Ventures / Provided with permission.
The Monster Squad, the 1980s horror-comedy directed by Fred Dekker and written by Shane Black, has endured over the past 30-plus years and continues to grow its fanbase. The actors frequently visit genre conventions, signing autographs and posing for photos, and when they appear alongside a screening of the film, seats are usually hard to come by.
The movie tells the story of a group of children who are obsessed by horror movies, and, lo and behold, they need to save the world when Dracula and his monstrous minions are unleashed in the local area. Aiding the Monster Squad is one creature who actually turns out to be nice — Frankenstein’s monster.
The Monster Squad still holds up, and its star, Andre Gower, still loves talking about its influence, impact and ever-growing fanbase. To document the continued dominance of this 1980s gem, Gower got the team together again for the filming of a new documentary, Wolfman’s Got Nards, now available on VOD. Of course, “Wolfman’s got nards” is one of the best-known lines from the original film.
“It really all goes back to that original cast reunion screening on 35mm at the original lone Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, Texas, in 2006, which kind of launched everything, the resurgence,” Gower said in a recent phone interview. “It lit the fuse that led to today, and a couple months later, we’re headlining big genre conventions. Monster Squad has this resurgence, and as you got to meet these fans that had come out of the woodwork that you didn’t were there in force like they were, you keep hearing these stories of how this movie either connected or impacted or influenced these kids or whenever they saw it in their lives. You’re like, that’s very interesting, very cool to hear, great, but those stories never stopped. They just kept coming, and they got bigger and deeper and more personal.”
Gower, who plays Sean in the movie, the one who wears the “Stephen King Rules” t-shirt, thought that these fan stories were so personal and so deep that a documentary was needed to preserve these sentiments of nostalgia. So he and his production team started hitting record as the cast members toured the film around the country for its 30th anniversary.
“And we thought this whole thing was going to end after a year or two or three, and it didn’t,” he said. “It just kept growing and growing and growing, and these stories got deeper and deeper, and bigger and more personal. … What I realized is that this connection to this particular film with these particular people is kind of unlike anything else. … It’s a different type of fanbase. It’s not even fandom. It’s their own thing, and for some reason these people connected with this movie. Or this movie connected to these people, and it impacted them in some way, shape or form. And I thought that was fascinating, and then to hear these stories of how it affected their lives or impacted them in some way, I realized after a while that those stories were a story.”
Gower and his team didn’t set out to make a making-of documentary or a where-are-they-now film. They wanted to construct a narrative about a community of fans who find connection in a theater, when the lights go down and the images appear on the screen. He wanted to document those young people who back in the 1990s recorded The Monster Squad off HBO onto their VHS. He was after community and friendships.
To help him fill in the blanks Gower also interviews Dekker (Night of the Creeps), Black (Lethal Weapon), Ashley Bank (Phoebe) and Ryan Lambert (Rudy), among others. Even the big man himself, Count Dracula (Duncan Regehr), makes an appearance.
“Fred’s interview was one of the last ones that we actually put on camera, and I think that ended up being a good thing,” Gower said about his chat with the director. “I think it took Fred a little bit of time to understand what we were trying to do. We had shown him a couple minutes of footage from stuff we had been working on a couple months prior, and then we had this 30-minute rough cut that we got to show at Fantastic Fest, a big film festival. We were doing a little tease thing, and we sent that to him. And that kind of sealed the deal, and he was like, ‘Look, this all looks fantastic. Let’s just do it.’ … He’s the only one that has a complicated relationship with this film because of the history and how it impacted and affected his life, so really in essence his interview is just another interview of an individual that this movie impacted and changed the course of their lives. But it’s almost an anti-interview because while everybody else is celebrating how they feel about it, Fred is examining and explaining why it’s complicated. We sat at his house, and the interview starts off in the daytime, and it ends up in the nighttime because you can see through the skylights in the back. He just got comfortable, and we were very fortunate enough that he went from A to Z through the trajectory of the experience. And I think it’s some of the best stuff in the movie.”
A lot of footage throughout Wolfman’s Got Nards is shot when some of the cast members toured the United States, jumping from Alamo Drafthouse to Alamo Drafthouse and interacting with fans. There’s a palpable energy in each sold-out crowd, and Gower loved every minute of it.
“If you could wish to be addicted on something, it would be that energy,” he said. “It is indescribable when you’re walking into theater after theater. … It really is something that is hard to describe. It was mind-blowing and exhausting, but it was fascinating and uplifting at the same time.”
So why Monster Squad? Why did this movie make it through the fray and lodge itself into the hearts of so many people who grew up on this comedic horror tale? Gower has a few theories.
“It was right in that sweet spot of things changing, story-wise, effects-wise, movie-wise,” the actor said. “I think everybody related to something in that movie, so it stuck with them.”
There is one somber moment in the new documentary, and that deals with Brent Chalem, the young actor who played the iconic role of Horace. He has many solid one-liners in The Monster Squad, and to this day his character is one of the most memorable and popular. Unfortunately Chalem has been unable to enjoy the celebrations and renewed interest in the film because he tragically died in 1997.
“It’s certainly sad, and it’s certainly tragic that he passed away in ‘97,” Gower said. “And what we learned on the tour and during our festival season with the documentary, a lot of people didn’t know that he passed away. … It’s not our story to tell. It’s certainly not my story to tell, so we wanted to find someone that could tell that story. And the only people left are friends of his because both of his parents passed, and he didn’t have any siblings. It obviously would have been much better that Brent Chalem be around and experience all this great stuff that’s going on because the world loves Horace, and they can’t hang out with him. And he can’t see that return.”
The new documentary is a celebration of a movie, a celebration of a fanbase and a celebration of a young man’s life taken too soon.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Wolfman’s Got Nards, directed by Andre Gower, is now available on demand. Click here for more information.
