BEFORE: Halloween is (finally) here, and this is the most appropriate movie, I think, for sitting in my living room and waiting for trick-or-treaters to ring the doorbell. Last night's movie was also about a haunted house, so I think that worked out rather well (and both were produced by Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment). Let's just hope the 2 bags of candy we bought last the night...
THE PLOT: Three teens discover that their neighbor's house is really a living, breathing, scary monster.
AFTER: Once you get past the oddness of the CGI (everyone seems to have really huge heads and either very scrawny bodies, or overly corpulent ones) this is not a bad little movie. Every neighborhood in the country has at least one "mean old man", and many also feature a rundown, spooky house that people tell scary stories about. Here the mean old man lives in the scary house, so it's a double-whammy.
This is a demonic house that appears to eat small children, dogs, and adults (when no one else is looking), tempting the grown-ups with their lost kites or toys from years ago, presumably lost in the house's yard. So that means the house is not only possessed, it's SMART. The mean old man, Mr. Nebbercracker, is voiced by Steve Buscemi, making an astonishing 12th appearance in my movies this year (twice as many as John Malkovich's 6), second only to Robert De Niro's 22.
The 3 kids who try to solve the mystery of the house are played by relative unknowns, but there's a lot of star power in the supporting cast - voices by Maggie Gyllenhall, Jon Heder, Kevin James, Nick Cannon, Jason Lee, and the ever-present Catherine O'Hara and Fred Willard. There's even a character in flashback voiced by Kathleen Turner - only for about 4 or 5 lines of dialogue!
There's a fair amount of thrill-ride action, of course not all of it is very believable (would a kid really know how to work construction equipment?) but hey, it's a cartoon. The main purpose is to entertain, even if it has to bend the rules. Would a house really have a gaping front-porch "mouth" and evil window-eyes? Of course not...
RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of cold medicine
SHOCK-O-METER: 3 out of 10 (the house actually was scary, but just cartoon-scary)
Good news - the candy held out through three waves of trick-or-treaters, I gave everyone a fun-size Snickers and a roll of Smarties, and still had some left over. So that's going to wrap up Shocktober and the Halloween season - I didn't get to watch movies about werewolves or serial killers, or delve into the movies based on Stephen King stories, but I had to save something for next year anyway...
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