MY FAVOURITE HORROR MOVIE: DAN PALMER

DAN PALMER IS AN ENGLISH WRITER, ACTOR AND PRODUCER WHO HAS STARRED IN HORROR COMEDIES SUCH AS FREAK OUT AND EVIL ALIENS. LAST YEAR HIS MOVIE STALLED (ABOUT A JANITOR TRAPPED IN A TOILET CUBICLE DURING A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE) PREMIERED AT FRIGHTFEST AND WAS A SMASH HIT WITH AUDIENCES AND CRITICS ALIKE. HERE HE TALKS ABOUT HIS FAVOURITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME, THE MONSTER SQUAD.

There was a flea-pit cinema on the edge of town. Don’t bother looking for it, it’s long gone now. My family rarely went to the cinema and we sure as hell didn’t go to this one. Although I’m positive that my old man would have dearly loved to as it primarily showed ‘blue’ movies.

Beside said perv emporium was a set of traffic-lights. Whenever the family wagon would get the red-light, on the way back from the weekend shop, a countdown would begin whereupon I would have an indeterminate (but always cruelly brief) amount of time to absorb as much information as possible from the newly mounted posters on the cinema’s facade.

One particular weekend Emmanuelle was taking a well-earned break, so something called ‘The Monster Squad’ was filling her vacant slot. Wolf-Man! Dracula! The Mummy! Frankenstein(’s Monster)! An ultimate rogues’ gallery of the legendary monsters that had scared me witless and shitless via TV, books, comics and, ahem, ‘The Groovy Ghoulies’ was glaring back at me in sinister unison. What was THIS? Just as the lights turned from red to amber my pre-pubescent peepers caught the poster’s tag-line. ‘You know who to call when you have ghosts. But who do you call when you have monsters?’

As a rabid ‘Ghostbusters’ fan this blew my fragile little mind. It had been two whole years since the release of the original ‘Ghostbusters’ movie, and we were about three years away from ‘The Real Ghostbusters’ cartoon, so the most lean reference to the best movie ever made had me bouncing off the walls of the Volvo as the traffic-lights turned green and that beautiful quad poster turned into a postage stamp sized spec on the horizon.

I had to see this film.

Now, ‘The Monster Squad’ may have been PG-13 in the States but it was Certificate 15 in the UK. There was no way my parents’ principles would allow me to see this film …I would have to wait for the video release as it would cost them less money. Cut to my birthday the following year: video night with my sister and cousins. We are stood in the New Releases section of my favourite rental store ‘Video Plus’ (don’t bother looking for it, it’s long gone now). That foreboding image from the flea-pit, branded on my brainium, is now staring down at me in the form of a shiny VHS rental.

I was mere moments away from finding out the answer to who I would call when I have monsters (I already had a pretty good idea).

Alas, it was not to be. You see my older cousin was one of those faux too cool for school types but was actually secretly terrified of horror movies (one time, during a viewing of Victor Salva’s ‘Clownhouse’, she pretended to read a trembling newspaper for ninety minutes). Using her little brother as an unwitting patsy she suddenly declared that this piece of filth would be too intense for my younger cousin. ‘But I’ve seen Robo Cop!?’ was his ignored response. So, ‘Adventures In Babysitting’ it was. My older cousin really enjoyed my birthday.

I finally got to see Fred Dekker’s sophomore effort aaaages later (the following weekend) and, needless to say, it did not disappoint. Like a lot of my favourite movies it had an immediate ‘What the Hell is this?’ quality. Not quite a horror movie (umm ..so, maybe I should have picked ‘Fright Night’ for this article?) and not quite a kids’ film.