BEFORE: I got a little sick yesterday after breakfast, probably one of those stomach bugs that's going around - I was just glad to know it wasn't the zombie virus. Best thing I could do was to just not eat anything for 24 hours and clean out the whole system, which was easy to do since I didn't have an appetite anyway. After doing that, I usually find that any food tastes amazing, no matter what it is.
Linking from "Shaun of the Dead", Bill Nighy was also in "G-Force" with Steve Buscemi.
THE PLOT: Dracula, who operates a high-end resort away from the human world, goes into overprotective mode when a boy discovers the resort and falls for the count's teen-aged daughter.
AFTER: This film was mostly fun, a bit too cutesy and completely not scary at all. I don't know what it is about today's society where people feel that kids can't be "traumatized" by anything scary in a film. Don't get me wrong, I was an impressionable kid and after seeing "Poltergeist" I had nightmares for a week - and after that I tended to avoid horror films, but that was my choice. But to protect all children everywhere, they've now taken all the scariness out of vampires, werewolves, mummies, etc. I suppose the process began with "Count Chocula" and "FrankenBerry" cereals, moved through "Young Frankenstein", and it's just kept rolling. The scariest movie monsters of the 1930's, like Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster are now, quite literally, cartoonish.
(ASIDE: Yes, I said "Frankenstein's Monster", not "Frankenstein". Because Frankenstein was the name of the SCIENTIST, not the monster. The novel made a terrible mistake by not giving the monster a name, and people over time have confused the monster with the man. But general laziness is not an excuse for continuing the mistake. How many people worked on this film? And not one of them could find the time to do a little research and find the correct name for the character?)
When I was a kid, there seemed to be a lot more fear in the Halloween, and not just because of erroneous reports of razor blades in apples and pins in Snickers bars. For one day a year, we were allowed to believe that the veil between this world and the spirit world was thinner, and perhaps one could commune with spirits. Fast forward to the present, and Dracula's throwing a birthday party for his daughter. (OK, I suppose the process really began in the 1960's with the novelty hit "Monster Mash", which riffed off a similar theme. It's hard to be scared of Dracula and the Wolfman when you think of them as part of a party jam band.)
But geez, what a way to cut all the scariness out of the "new" Dracula. He a businessman running a hotel, he cares about his daughter, he even drinks a blood substitute - and he's afraid of humans? What happened to Vlad the Impaler, feeding off of humans, and all that? In fact all of the movie monsters are afraid of humans, including the Invisible Man, who technically is a human, and the werewolf, who used to be human - so you'd think they would at least know a little bit about human culture, right?
Well, the film doesn't really worry about any of the technicalities. I admit there's some clever stuff in the hotel set-up, like having zombie bellhops and witches as maids (because they ride brooms, get it?) but nothing else really gets about grade-school humor level - which is their target audience, no doubt, but the best animated films also aim a little higher. I suppose you can take some of this as a metaphor for parents letting go when their kids want to leave the nest, but this is an odd message in a film otherwise aimed at 8-year-olds.
Another odd message is implying that people will only fall in love once, and if they let that person get away, they'll never be truly happy. What? In a film that otherwise Hallmark-ifies classic monsters, why even suggest that people will be miserable when they grow up, and pining over lost loves? That seems very out of place.
Dracula himself here fights against his own image - even within a cartoon that reduces him to a stereotype, his character complains that the world has reduced him to a stereotype. The monsters come face to face with a group of fans, a MonsterCon of sorts, and this in itself is a little odd. Do the monsters want to be loved, or feared? There doesn't seem to be a clear answer, just contradictory logic.
Also starring the voices of Adam Sandler (last seen in "Reign Over Me"), Andy Samberg (last seen in "The Watch"), Kevin James (last seen in "Here Comes the Boom"), Fran Drescher (last seen in "Jack"), Selena Gomez, David Spade (last seen in "Reality Bites"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Never Been Kissed"), Cee-Lo Green, Jon Lovitz (last seen in "3000 Miles to Graceland"), Chris Parnell, Rob Riggle.
RATING: 4 out of 10 flying tables
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