Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Looks like the guys at Platinum Dunes are serious about getting this remake of THE MONSTER SQUAD done. It went from Rob Cohen saying he wanted to direct it to writers hired pretty quickly. The writers in question, according to the Heat Vision Blog are cousins Mark and Brian Gunn. Yep, they're related to James Gunn who, whether he knew it or not, essentially remade Fred Dekker's other great '80s horror flick NIGHT OF THE CREEPS with SLITHER. Their biggest claim to fame right now is their work on the JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH sequel script. Th optimist in me can hope that the twisted humor prevalent in James Gunn's work runs in the family, but the rest of me just can't help shaking the feeling that this is a train wreck in the making. I was rewatching TRICK R TREAT recently and it struck me that if they're bound and determined to remake Monster Squad, if Fred Dekker is out of the running completely, then they should give the movie to Mike Dougherty. I posited that very thing on Twitter and Dougherty responded that he'd rather leave well enough alone, which I absolutely respect... but man, the dude gets the tone. I'm not sure the guys producing (and possibly even Cohen himself) see the value of this movie beyond "potential family-oriented franchise." What struck a chord with kids of my generation is that there were real troubles, real danger and although Black and Dekker (heh) wrote the kids to have slightly more exaggerated, noir-ish rapid fire dialogue they felt real. Kids cursing, but in an innocent way... that's how my friends and I talked then. We had just discovered cursing and awkwardly used these dangerous words when around each other. Small details like that I'm sure will be stripped from the movie. The lead kid's parents going through a nasty separation... all those little things add up. My greatest fear is the Monster Squad is going to turn into a slick, big budgeted hollow studio film that doesn't understand what spawned the fanbase for the original in the first place. The Gunns have a massive hill to climb. I hope they at least give it their all, but with such power producers onboard I have to assume their personal input is going to be minimal and they've been hired to make Cohen, Fuller and Form's vision. -Quint quint@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter
