Friday 22 March 2013

Today's Review: Hotel Transylvania


Just as I was celebrating the rising quality of CGI movies in recent years, along comes another that leaves a mediocre taste in my mouth. Hotel Transylvania stars Adam Sandler as Count Dracula, who has opened a hotel in his vast castle to serve as a place for monsters to get away from all the humans that will come after them with pitchforks and fire and the like. As he celebrates his daughter's 118th birthday with his misfit band of monster friends, a quite friendly and unassuming human unwittingly stumbles into the castle and sets off a right rollicking adventure.

Yeah, that's about it plot wise. It's about as generic as you can get, so much so that they have to fill the rest of the movie with disconnected "fun" sequences that show all kinds of monsters in all kinds of humorous situations. I use "humorous" lightly. Of course, since Adam Sandler is starring, and since Sony love him for the amount of money he inexplicably makes them from his awful movies, all of Sandler's friends show up in the cast as well. It's like an animated version of Grown Ups, where instead of boring grown ups messing around, it's boring monsters, and there's also a love story between some vampire daughter and some human which isn't really fleshed out.

I think the worst thing for me is that for some reason I thought Steve Carrell played Dracula before I actually started watching, and instead I was greeted with a stupid Adam Sandler accent that didn't even remain consistent. Also, since Dracula bears a resemblance to Gru from Despicable Me, I was longing for that sweet Carrell voice to deliver me from this bland experience. Sadly, it was not to be, and even Steve Buscemi could not rouse me from my utter indifference. Still, it's quite nicely animated, so I guess that counts for something.

So there you have it, Hotel Transylvania, not a great movie. My kids enjoyed it, but kids are easy to please apparently.

My rating: 1/5

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