By Katherine Monk
Featuring: Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Kevin James, Fran Drescher, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, CeeLo Green
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Pity the poor, beleaguered vampire: Not even he can find fresh blood these days.
Drained by teen franchises and endless reincarnations, the once-mighty night-stalker has become the stuff of kiddie cartoons ? the kind, doting daddy at the heart of Hotel Transylvania.
Drafting its central design from a template of Gothic fiction and every Scooby-Doo episode ever written, this new pony from Sony?s animation studio features a scary hotel, where all kinds of ghouls gather for the holidays.
To any mortal, the Hotel Transylvania would be the scariest place on Earth, since it?s run by Dracula and plays host to Frankenstein, werewolves and any variety of monster looking for some alone time. Fortunately, Dracula has gone to great lengths to keep the mortals out, because he feels humans have ruined his life.
Way back in the past, when Dracula lived a meterosexual-meets-Heathcliff lifestyle, he fell in love. The only problem was, the townsfolk were afraid, accused him of being a vampire (because he was) and burned his house down.
His wife perished in the blaze, but their baby daughter survived. A century later, his little baby girl is all grown up, and now she wants to explore the world outside ? leaving daddy Dracula a little overprotective.
Couple her wanderlust with the arrival of a backpacking human boy who loves far-flung places, and suddenly, our bloodsucking patriarch is starting to look a lot like Archie Bunker in a cape.
And that?s what this whole movie feels like: Archie trying to protect Gloria in all the wrong ways, and getting into all sorts of nasty trouble with his friends. Granted, any All in the Family references will be lost on the tots squirming in their seats for this 3-D spectacle.
They may not even know who Adam Sandler is, which means any Opera Man reference will also end up on the floor, with the rogue kernels of popped corn.
Ah. To be young and not feel the weight of repetition that builds up behind your eyeballs and sinks into your throat ? a quiet gurgle of dreariness aerated by rage.
Yet, how sad, too, that some young child will experience Hotel Transylvania as their first big-movie experience, with glasses and all.
Where the luckiest generation had Bambi to carve the edges of the big screen into memory, these poor souls will end up watching an extended string of dirty diaper jokes as delivered by Sandler and a host of other Saturday Night Live alumni.
Perhaps it was this particular source of humour that became the most irritating, even if it did make the six-year-olds in the audience laugh out loud ? every time, especially if there was an accompanying cloud of green gas emanating from someone?s trouser leg.
And let?s face it: even the most uptight among us can bust a gut with a good friend and a whoopee-cushion.
However, one good fart joke does not beg for another. And one played-out father-daughter arc can stink up a whole movie without any fresh air.
The script for Hotel Transylvania is baseline and completely predictable, hoping we may mistake the odd Twilight reference and the monster point of view as updates. It doesn?t work, because for all the saucy condiments, the burger is a sitcom patty stuffed with poopy-pants jokes.
The filmmakers were smart enough to nod to the masters of horror, conjuring images of such original classics as Frankenstein onscreen, but they don?t follow through with any new material.
Despite song and dance numbers featuring the vocal talents of Selena Gomez (who plays the daughter, Mavis), three-dimensional razzle-dazzle and eye-popping action sequences fuelled by top-notch computer animation, everything about Hotel Transylvania feels anemic.
Even the film seems to acknowledge its own ennui when it gives us a scene where Dracula explains why he no longer needs to kill people: They perfected blood substitutes, and he can just buy them off the shelf.
Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/09/28/review-ghouls-just-wanna-have-fun-at-hotel-transylvania/
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