'Monster Squad' Director Fred Dekker Wants To Direct Again For The First Time In 26 Years

Fred Dekker has only directed three films, but he's well-known to genre fans. Dekker is responsible for the horror cult classics Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad, but his directing days came to a halt when he helmed 1993's RoboCop 3. Since then, Dekker has done some TV screenwriting, but finally returned to features in 2018 by penning The Predator script with Monster Squad collaborator Shane Black. Now, some 26 years since his last directing gig, Fred Dekker says he's ready to make a new movie.

I doubt Fred Dekker is what you'd call a household name, but he does have a devoted fanbase that cherishes Night of the Creeps and Monster Squad (I doubt anyone cherishes RoboCop 3, though). While I wasn't a huge fan of the new Predator, I did appreciate how funny and quirky the script was – and that's primarily due to the work of Dekker and Shane Black, who previously co-wrote The Monster Squad together. I think Dekker definitely still has the goods, and I'd love to see him direct something new – a sentiment Dekker shares.

Speaking with Retro Injection, Dekker said that he's "actively trying to find something that would put me back in the director's chair – that's really my priority right now." Of course, this isn't a sure-thing, but here's hoping it all works out, especially if Dekker wants to make a horror throw-back in the same vein as Night of the Creeps and Monster Squad.

In the meantime, Dekker is keeping busy with Shane Black. In the same interview, he comments that he and Black are "developing a cable TV reboot of the 1960s British spy show, The Avengers." Not to be confused with Marvel's Avengers, The Avengers was a British series that ran from 1961 to 1969. It was previously adapted into a terrible movie starring Uma Thurman, Ralph Fiennes and Sean Connery. Hopefully Black and Dekker's reboot is a bit better than that.

Dekker also mentions working on an "action movie based on the old Destroyer adventure novels." Per Wikipedia, The Destroyer is a "series of paperback novels about a U.S. government operative named Remo Williams, originally by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir." The books were the inspiration for the 1985 spy thriller Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, which was supposed to launch a series of films, but performed poorly at the box office. Since then, though, it's developed something of a cult following.

I'll admit that neither The Avengers nor The Destroyer projects sound very exciting to me, but if they keep Dekker working, I can't complain. Now please, someone hire him to direct a horror movie again.