BEFORE: OK, you can maybe see why I'm doing things this way, because logically this should follow "Hubie Halloween" due to the Adam Sandler connection, right? Only Adam Sandler's NOT doing the voice of Dracula any more. I'm not sure if he quit the franchise or if they couldn't afford him any more, or if he just wasn't available, but they just hired a sound-alike Adam Sandler impersonator of some kind, who probably works on the cheap. OK, so Kevin James then carries over as Frankenstein's Monster, no problem. Wait, he's not in this one, either? Too busy? Too expensive? I guess it doesn't really matter, the kids don't really care who does the voices, this would only be a problem if some idiot were linking movies by actor for some weird reason and needed to find a connection in order to continue with his nonsensical plan.
Steve Buscemi carries over from "Hubie Halloween". No worries, I got this covered.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation" (Movie #3,376)
THE PLOT: After one experiment, Johnny turns into a monster and everyone else becomes human. Now it has to be seen whether they will be able to reverse this experiment.
AFTER: I work in animation production, at least part of the time - or perhaps I should say that I work tangentially to animation production, I'm support staff for animators, doing office work and accounting and festival entries and script work and anything else I can get my hands on behind the scenes that isn't drawing or coloring or animating. Someone at this studio art sale I was running last month asked what I did for the animator, and I started listing off job titles, and he cut me off about halfway through and just said, "So, you're like a Swiss Army knife for film production..." and I said "EXACTLY." Actually my BFF Andy came up with that description for me a few years back, and it kind of stuck, and I don't really mind a bit. But my whole career has been spent working for small shops and indie directors.
I have a feeling that if I worked for a bigger studio, I'd have ONE job, and I'd be expected to do JUST that, and I'd be bored as hell. As exhausted as I can get sometimes, the job is always changing and therefore always interesting, if nothing else. The other thing is that this way I tend to avoid a lot of meetings, which would put me right to sleep. There were probably a million meetings for just this one film about whether the story hits the right beats, and how should Dracula look when he gets turned into a human, should he have thinning hair and a pot belly and let's brainstorm a list of ways that being a human is worse than being a vampire. Vampires have superhuman strength and hypnotic powers and they can turn into bats, which is all cool. OK, now let's make another column for the benefits of being human, like now he can go out into the sunlight and he can swim and... OH GOD let me kill myself just to get out of this conversation or avoid this meeting.
Then there had to be a meeting about what the human character is going to look like when he gets turned into a monster, and another one to cover what the monster characters are going to look like when they turn human. Which is ridiculous because for some reason in the "Hotel Transylvania" series, the werewolf is always a werewolf and the Invisible Man is always invisible. BUT in film history, the whole point of lycanthropy is that infected humans turn into werewolves only when the moon is full, and then they TURN BACK. And the Invisible Man takes a potion and turns invisible, but then the potion wears off and he's VISIBLE again. Why, in the other films in this series, were their bodies both stuck in the monster form? They should both be able to turn back and forth, so it shouldn't be a surprise when their human forms are revealed. It seems like maybe the scriptwriters were just lazy before, or the films didn't have enough time to devote to these minor characters.
It's played for laughs here, but for three films the Invisible Man has been portrayed with a floating pair of glasses, that's all that we've seen of the character because he's invisible 24/7, and he's also been walking around the hotel NAKED. This is...well, a bit odd for a children's film, not to mention inconsiderate, unhygienic and also a bit nasty. Somebody needs to cancel the Invisible Man character, like immediately, he's perverted and disgusting if this is what he enjoys doing. OK, we're a bit shocked to learn what this character really looks like, but why is HE shocked when he's suddenly visible? Did he forget what he looked like, because he's been invisible for so long? That doesn't seem possible.
Similarly, Wayne, the werewolf father, is unrecognizable to his own kids once he turns back into human form. Umm, they're wolves, wouldn't he still smell the same, and sound the same, so why don't his own kids recognize him? Are they that stupid? Also, once he turns human, suddenly he doesn't have to look after his own kids and his wife has to do all the work? That's a terrible cop-out from a story point of view and a bad example to show the kids in the audience. Why wasn't there a meeting about THAT? For that matter, why wasn't there a meeting about Mavis' terribly irregular bangs or Ericka Van Helsing's unusual bulging cheeks? I noticed both things every single time in every shot, that means they're both distracting and should have been changed.
There was also an opportunity to send out some kind of message about self-acceptance, like the previous films had Dracula dealing with his vampire daughter dating a human, so it was a cute little reverse on the tired old "I Married a Witch" or "Bride of Frankenstein" tropes, in this case a monster had to learn to accept a human into his family. So it's OK to be a monster, it's OK to be human, family is about accepting each other the way we are, and all that was positive stuff. But here suddenly it's a step backwards, Dracula has second thoughts about retiring and handing over his hotel to his daughter and her husband, simply because he's a weird human who's going to make all kinds of weird human changes to the Hotel Transylvania. So.. then he's NOT OK with his son-in-law, after all, and all the Drac progress from before is undone. Sure, it's OK for Dracula to date a human, and a former monster-hunting Van Helsing at that, but suddenly his human son-in-law isn't good enough? What a hypocrite. Time for another story meeting.
Drac makes up a phony story about some Transylvanian real estate law to avoid handing over the keys, so Johnny feels the need to seek out the mad scientist's help to turn himself into a monster. Yes, because we should all subvert our true natures just to fit in, we should change our inner selves to make our parents or in-laws happy, because there's something WRONG with us. Another terrible message to send out to the kids, especially during a time when kids might be struggling with identity issues, or LGBTQ issues, or trans rights are being threatened, this is hitting exactly the wrong tone. What if Mavis were dating a woman, and Dracula couldn't accept that, and put pressure on her to date a man instead? What if his daughter-in-law felt the need to transform into a man, or vice versa, just to make Dracula happy? That would be wrong, right? So then this is wrong too.
But no, every other monster has to pay the price for Dracula's anti-human bigotry, and it's inconvenient for everybody, except maybe Frankenstein's Monster, whose dead flesh gets healed when he turns human, and he becomes quite attractive, by human standards. So, umm, why does he want to turn back into a monster, exactly? NITPICK POINT: For the FOURTH TIME, Frankenstein's Monster is just named "Frankenstein". JE-SUS, that's the name of the scientist who built him, not the god-damned monster, what does it take for them to get this right? Didn't we have a meeting about this?
And look, I know it's been a tough two years-plus. The COVID pandemic upended everything in everybody's lives. But still, why doesn't a movie with vampires and werewolves and mummies and Frankenstein's monster ever get scheduled for an October release? "Hotel Transylvania 3" was released on July 13, 2018, but it was a film about the monsters going on summer vacation, so it made some kind of sense. For "Hotel Transylvania 4", the original plan was announced in February 2019 to release it in December, 2021. In April 2020, the release date was moved up to August 6, 2021, then it got moved again to July 2021. I know I saw movie posters for it when I was working in the AMC last summer. But then due to COVID the release date got changed to October 1, 2021 - ah, now that makes sense! Get the film out in time for Halloween season! But no, it was not to be, all the theatrical release plans were scrapped and the film got released on Prime Video in mid-January 2022. What a stupid way to run a studio, I'm just saying I could probably do a better job. But Lord help me, I don't think I could stand the meetings.
Instead I'm about to spend three of the next four days setting up a booth and then working at New York Comic-Con. It's exhausting during the busy times and mind-numbingly boring during the slow times. But it's what I do, and this year I'm going to think to myself, "Hey, this could be a lot worse. I could be stuck in the meeting from HELL debating what the Mummy should look like when he gets hit with a magic ray and turns into a 5,000 year old Egyptian man."
NITPICK POINT #2: Dracula, even after being turned into a human, and not willing to take responsibility for his bigotry and pride and faults, sets out on a quest with his now-monster son-in-law to find some weird crystal, deep in the Amazon jungle, that can fix things. Only this quest could have been easily avoided, if he'd just owned up to his mistakes. As we see later in the film, it needed to take all the monsters working together to complete the quest and solve the puzzle. Why couldn't he just swallow his pride and ask for help, thus fixing the situation more rapidly? For that matter, he could have gotten his vampire powers back more quickly just by finding another vampire to turn him into a vampire, because isn't that how vampirism works? So much of this story is so poorly thought out, it's PAINFULLY dumb. But I guess this all explains why they never released the film in theaters, it's so bad they probably felt the box office numbers would be an embarrassment, so sure, get it onto streaming ASAP so nobody will see the studio's failure in numerical form.
Also starring the voices of Andy Samberg (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Selena Gomez (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Kathryn Hahn (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Jim Gaffigan (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), David Spade (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Keegan-Michael Key (last seen in "The Prom"), Brian Hull, Fran Drescher (last seen in "After Class"), Brad Abrell, Asher Blinkoff (last heard in "Sing 2"), Zoe Berri, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins (last seen in "Free Guy"), Genndy Tartakovsky (also last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Victoria Gomez, Jennifer Kluska, Asher Bishop (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Derek Drymon (last heard in "Turbo"), Aaron LaPlante (last heard in "Vivo"), Melissa Sturm (last heard in "The Mitchells vs the Machines"), Chloé Malaisé, Scott Underwood (last heard in "The Addams Family"), Michelle Murdocca, Will Townsend (last heard in "The Emoji Movie").
RATING: 2 out of 10 unsupervised werewolf pups. (Seriously? Resposible Mavis makes sure to bring other people's kids on the quest, but forgets about her OWN SON? Is there a "Home Alone" style short that shows what happened to Dennis, Winnie and their pets after their parents all left?)
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