Movie Review - ‘Hotel Transylvania’

By Bob Garver

I have a feel­ing that “Hotel Tran­syl­va­nia” is going to become a Hal­loween insti­tu­tion. Not because it’s in any way a good movie (it isn’t), but because of its cast of char­ac­ters. The film makes the good deci­sion to com­bine clas­sic Hal­loween crea­tures in such a way that the mere idea of them inter­act­ing with each other sets the imag­i­na­tion to a pleas­ant bub­ble. The crea­tures may not actu­ally do any­thing funny or inter­est­ing, but based on the premise you’ll get the impres­sion that some­thing funny or inter­est­ing could hap­pen at any time.

At the fore­front is Count Drac­ula (Adam San­dler, thank­fully play­ing the role with rel­a­tive matu­rity). He runs a hotel for mon­sters that dou­bles as a safe house to pro­tect them from “evil” humans. His daugh­ter Mavis (Selena Gomez) is cel­e­brat­ing her 118th birth­day and all the fam­ily friends are in town for a big party. Among the guests are Franken­stein and his wife Eunice (Kevin James and Fran Drescher respec­tively), Wayne and Wendy Were­wolf (Steve Buscemi and Molly Shan­non respec­tively), Mur­ray the Mummy (Cee-Lo Green), Grif­fin the Invis­i­ble Man (David Spade), Qua­si­modo (Jon Lovitz), and hun­dreds of other assorted creatures.

Mavis is happy to see every­one, but what she really wants is to go out into the world after spend­ing her whole life in the hotel. Now that she’s 118, she has her father’s per­mis­sion to do so. He sug­gests that she start small and visit a nearby vil­lage. The “peo­ple” in the vil­lage threaten her and she retreats to the hotel ter­ri­fied of humans all over again. Unbe­knownst to her, the entire scene was a setup by her father to scare her into stay­ing in the hotel for­ever. Unbe­knownst to him, the fake scene attracted the atten­tion of a real human tourist named Johnny (Andy Sam­berg) who then shows up at the hotel.

Drac­ula knows that Johnny is harm­less, but he’s afraid that his pres­ence will cause a panic among the guests, par­tic­u­larly Mavis, whose fear of humans has recently been renewed. He dis­guises Johnny as a mon­ster and makes up a phony-baloney cover story about him being a party plan­ner while try­ing to sneak him out of the hotel.

For his part, Johnny is a sweet, love­able klutz who wants to befriend the mon­sters. He causes a lot of trou­ble when he first arrives, but is soon her­alded as the life of the party. It should come as no sur­prise that he falls for Mavis.

The jokes are what you’d expect from a San­dler movie: lots of potty humor, grossouts, and annoy­ances played for laughs. Even with super­nat­ural char­ac­ters, the gags seem tired. Drac­ula is an over­pro­tec­tive father, Frankenstein’s body parts fall off, the were­wolf has fleas and out-of-control-kids, the mummy is fat, the Invis­i­ble Man can get away with pranks,

Qua­si­modo has an exag­ger­ated French accent, and every­body eats dis­gust­ing things like bugs. The char­ac­ters insult each other a lot, and the film is par­tial to gags where the char­ac­ters deal with being stereo­typed. Also, this is one of those ani­mated movies that thinks it’s incred­i­bly funny for the char­ac­ters to break dance and yes, rap.

“Hotel Tran­syl­va­nia” is a film that kids will prob­a­bly love, since they likely aren’t old enough to be bored by it. They’ll see that the film has a ton of intrigu­ing ele­ments like vam­pires and mon­sters and they won’t see that the film can’t han­dle these ele­ments with a lot of cre­ativ­ity. I can com­plain about the film’s imma­ture humor all I want, but since the tar­get audi­ence is imma­ture I can’t say they won’t enjoy it.

It’s appro­pri­ate that “Hotel Tran­syl­va­nia” is a Hal­loween film, as I con­sider it the cin­e­matic equiv­a­lent of the junk food kids col­lect while trick-or-treating. There’s a good chance they’ll like it, but they won’t be bet­ter for hav­ing seen it.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“Hotel Tran­syl­va­nia” is rated PG for some rude humor, action, and scary images. Its run­ning time is 91 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Oct 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.