I remember The Monster Squad. 

I remember a time when just because a film starred and was directed at children, it didn't have to be full of sunshine and lollipops and completely fabricated life lessons. There was a time when kids' movies had monsters, mild violence, and (I speak metaphorically here) balls.

The Lost Boys. Little Monsters. The Electric Grandmother. Monster Squad. To a degree, The Goonies. These were films that, unlike so many children's movies today, had respect for their audience. They understood that children wish to be treated like adults; that, just like adults, they're willing to take a significant amount of gore, excitement, and maybe even cursing in their entertainment. They don't want to be force-fed moral messages or asked to uphold the societal status quo. They want action, they want humor, and they want to be treated as goddamn equals.

A precious few outlets of children's entertainment (Kung Fu Panda and Doctor Who, for instance) actually endeavor to respect these wishes, but for the most part children's movies are an outright pain to sit through. If they're not Pixar, they're poorly attempting to be Pixar, and that usually means a lot of pointless moralizing and themes about "friendship" and "heroism," whatever the hell those mean.

The children's horror comedies of the 80's were much more thematically complex: they were about rising to the occasion and doing the right thing, and stuff, but they were also about being killed in horribly violent ways. The Lost Boys, for all its first act goth shenanigans, eventually turned out to be a movie about Corey Feldman horrifically dispatching vampires in a final, bloody fight scene. On the one hand, you've obviously got a little "puberty and adulthood are like a fight against eternal evil" allegory, but on the other hand, you've got some bloody entertainment that's just plain fun to watch.

I mean, just look at this trailer for The Monster Squad:

If you're done laughing at "Wolfman's got nards," then I'll give you two things to consider.

Firstly, think about the fact that the kids, and only the kids, are the heroes of this movie. For the most part, modern children's flicks put adults in roles where they support the child "heroes" as often as possible.Trying to instill this a trust for the elder generation makes children easier to control, and less controversial where uppity parents are concerned. The old children's horror comedies did not subscribe to this philosophy. The heroes of these films were the kids themselves, and the adults were basically relegated to the same role police fulfill in slasher movies; they're either a hindrance to the protagonists, or completely worthless. Remember when you were a kid? Remember how that's exactly how the world felt? Modern children's movies desperately want to ignore that feeling and pretend it doesn't exist.

Secondly, look at how fucking badass those kids are acting. One kid shoots a werewolf with a gun. Another straps dynamite to a mummy's chest and kicks him out a fucking window. Parents are so quick to decry anything (other than their own parenting, of course) as inspiring violent behavior in children these days, and so most all children's movie heroes never engage in any sort of violent behavior to solve their problems.

These sorts of characters can be really interesting if the moral of the story is not to use violence (again, see Doctor Who), but more often than not these heroes usually engage in some sort of violence, but the consequences are either totally downplayed (the baddies are only "knocked out," not killed), or they engage in a sort of indirect violence (Mulan blows up a mountain and causes an avalanche, rather than firing her rocket at the bad guys directly). The issue is not a moral or thematic one, but merely a means of avoiding angry letters from shitty parents. Movies like Monster Squad were made in a time where that sort of bullshit attitude, thankfully, did not exist.

So, I implore you, Hollywood: bring back the children's horror-comedy. Kung Fu Panda was a fantastic step forward in respecting your child audience and using violence without making it seem boring or ambivalent -- just take it a little further and give us some full-blown, live-action horror comedies. We loved them then, and this generation, having been spoon-fed all sorts of bullshit since birth, will find it a breath of fresh air.