FYI, this article contains spoilers.
I grew up loving to watch two movies: The Goonies and The Monster Squad.
I literally probably watched these two movies 5 times each per week when I was a kid.
Over the years, I have seen parts of The Goonies and I feel like it holds up to the amazement I felt as a kid watching the child heroes defeat and out-smart the evil adults.
However, I had not re-visited The Monster Squad until a couple of months ago.
In The Monster Squad, not only were the kids smarter and more knowledgeable than the adults, they also had to overcome the obstacle of becoming smarter and defeating the damn monsters!
And these were monsters like the wolfman, the mummy, the swamp man, and Dracula himself. Not a small task.
So the movie starts off way back in the olden days and Dracula awakens in the basement of an old castle and starts walking.
Then we see a large group of people with torches approaching the castle. A couple of guys walk up to the main wooden gate and throw a molotov-style cocktail bomb to blow up the front gate.
Then the group of people enter the castle, only to encounter a zombie woman eating a possum.
She dies from a wooden stake to the chest.
This is done in an attempt to free some time for the old men to bring in a young female virgin to recite some shit in German to a magical amulet in order to send the evilness of Dracula into a black hole for all eternity.
Some good men and the young virgin were lost into the black hole, some antique furniture was sacrificed, 80s special effects happened, but the good news is that evil was contained. Typical children movie plots happening here.
Then we fast-forward to the 1980s and we meet two members of The Monster Squad, with Sean Crenshaw (pictured on the right in the red shirt) representing the group’s leader.
The other members of the group:
The fat kid (AKA Horace)
Wait, that kid on the right side with the blue shirt kind of looks familiar. Where have I seen him before? Who is he?
Holy shit, it’s Wayne (Jason Hervey) from The Wonder Years! He was also a bully in The Monster Squad just like he was in The Wonder Years, too. Sadly, this film does not have Fred Savage.
Jason Hervey’s character in The Monster Squad was not a part of the official Monster Squad group, however. He was mainly just a dick to the fat kid. Sorry, I meant to call him Horace because I’m nice.
More Monster Squad Members
The badass cigarette smoking teenager Rudy, who wasn’t a member at first. He became a member partway through the movie.
There were some other members of the group, but I need to speed things along. We need bollards.
So Dracula ends up on a private airplane flight with other cargo, including Frankenstein’s monster.
NOTE: For the rest of this post, I am just going to refer to Frankenstein’s monster simply as Frankenstein, since that’s what everyone calls him anyways.
They both escape from the airplane. The Monster Squad group meets. Sean tries to talk to his parents about the monsters. The wolfman goes crazy in a police station. The mummy escapes from the museum. The swamp monster emerges.
Then the monsters gather to bring Frankenstein out of his coffin.
The kids meet some more, try to inform their parents about the monsters. Of course, the parents don’t believe what’s going on. The kids meet the scary German guy. They eat pie with him as he explains some shit that’s happening.
What about Frankenstein?
Frankenstein is supposed to be working for Dracula to infiltrate the Monster Squad group, but ends up being super friendly to Sean’s little sister and eventually the Monster Squad group embraces him.
Oh, and Frankenstein also manages to take a Polaroid photo of Sean’s older, underage sister’s tits as she undresses in the window next-door to the clubhouse.
Which Rudy is pleasantly surprised to see when he gets the photos developed. Rudy totally wanted to bang Sean’s older sister.
You can watch the movie and see what else happens. Basically, the kids know what’s going on with the monsters. The parents and police don’t understand and don’t believe what’s happening. Sean’s father does believe a little bit, but his cop buddy doesn’t.
Which leads to a somewhat confusing scene.
Dracula is Badass
We learn very early on in the movie that Dracula will be the man to beat. He’s the main enemy, despite all the other easily beatable monsters getting in his way. But how will the kids beat Dracula?
What if something as formidable as concrete traffic bollards can’t even stop Dracula from possibly ram-raiding the Monster Squad treehouse/clubhouse and killing our child heroes?
Let’s jump to a scene that involves Sean’s cop dad and his partner driving down a long road at night.
They quickly realize that there is a car headed straight for them coming from the opposite direction.
It just so happens to be Dracula driving his badass hearse. And he’s driving fast.
Side note: I never understood how Dracula got this car. He was away for a long, long time, yet he was able to somehow plan 100 years ahead to the 1980s to make sure he has an evil hearse ready for him to drive? Cars didn’t even exist when evil was locked up in the black-hole at the beginning of the movie!
Anyways…
Dracula keeps hauling ass straight at the cops. Then, magically, Dracula drives straight through the cop car.
Moments later, Dracula slowly approaches Sean’s house in his vehicle.
And proceeds to be stopped by… crashing into a small white picket fence? What the hell?
The argument could be made that Dracula was just slowing down in order to come to a safe and complete stop to exit the vehicle instead of trying to ram-raid Sean’s house. But I think Dracula had ill-intentions.
I think he wanted to do some damage to Sean’s family by crashing into their house. And I think the wooden white picket fence had something to do with this sudden turn of events.
Just a moment ago, this hearse drove straight through a cop car. Now it is being stopped by a flimsy picket fence?
So?
Think about it. Wooden stakes kill vampires. And this wooden fence helped to slow down and stop Dracula’s ghost hearse.
OK, what actually happens next is that Dracula gets out of the car, walks to the backyard, and blows up the squad’s clubhouse.
So maybe his overall intention wasn’t to ram-raid Sean’s house and kill Sean’s mother. Dracula was actually just sending a message to the kids that he’s willing to fuck some shit up with dynamite and ruin their prized hangout spot.
But the thing to take away at this point is that the ghost hearse drove through another vehicle, yet, the Dracula hearse was not able to drive through a wooden picket fence.
Real Life
Let’s bring this information into a real life situation. Let’s say that there was a monster outbreak in a major metropolitan area. And these real-life monsters had vehicles available to drive, like The Monster Squad’s Dracula did.
It’s highly likely that they would want to ram-raid buildings to gain easy access inside and murder a lot of people, say, in a heavily populated office building.
And I think the typical concrete bollard would not be able to protect these buildings.
They would not protect the buildings from ghost car attacks. The monsters would easily be able to drive through the bollards and then drive through the walls of buildings to start their massacre.
How to Protect a City if Monsters had Access to Ghost Cars
Wooden bollards, my friend. Old-school, wooden maritime-style bollards.
But the bollards would probably have a more updated style to fit the architect’s building planning intentions. Like these wooden bollards pictured below.
They would be able to stop Dracula’s car if he plotted a ram-raid attack on a city building.

Sean and his cop dad approaching Rudy after Rudy shot the wolfman with a silver bullet.
If a ghost vehicle can’t seamlessly travel through a thin wooden fence, think about the damage a set of wooden bollards would do. They would crash hard, screwing up the engine and overall structure of the ghost vehicle.
This would leave a huge window for heroic passerby or the local police to take action and apprehend the stunned evil monsters.
Recommendations if There is a Monster Outbreak
I would basically recommend installing sturdy wooden bollards in any style around major buildings and homes in your neighborhood. Especially if Dracula is the main antagonist in your real-life monster situation like The Monster Squad.
I Know How to Protect Myself with Wooden Bollards, So How Does the Movie End?
A lot of human policemen die.
And it turns out that Sean’s older sister, the boobs Frankenstein photographed earlier, is not a virgin. So she couldn’t recite the German shit to the amulet to open the black-hole.
Instead, Sean’s little sister is the only female virgin in the area to open the black-hole.
Dracula calls the little girl a bitch…
Frankenstein ends up (almost) killing Dracula with a gigantic uppercut and Dracula getting speared.
Naturally, there’s a final battle between Sean and Dracula. But Dracula loses, of course. With Sean driving a pointy wooden thing (a broomstick?) through Dracula’s heart.
Sadly, we do lose Frankenstein at the end to the black-hole.
The End
So this post isn’t completely about bollards ruining the plot of a movie. It is mostly an article about using the information from an awesome 80s movie in order to come up with a solution to protect yourself with bollards in case there is an outbreak of monsters in your local area.
Please share if you like this article or learn the bollard definition.
Hi.
I used to watch the Monster Squad almost every day when I was a kid. Such a good PG-13ish horror movie for teens that isn’t too creepy.