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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 36.89%
Worth A Look: 40.78%
Average: 13.59%
Pretty Bad: 4.85%
Total Crap: 3.88%
10 reviews, 43 user ratings
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| Monster House |
by Doug Bentin
"I hate it when this happens."
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That is, when an animated movie for kids turns out to be terrific for adults as well. It's just unnatural, at least since Uncle Walt died.I wish I were reviewing “Monster House” after having seen it in 3-D. People who have seem to think that it’s the second coming of sound, color, and widescreen all wrapped up in one package. The Cinemark theater chain has recently announced that it wants to put one 3-D screening room in most of its multiplexes, but I’ve seen nothing about our TinselTown. Let’s hope for the best.
But “Monster House” flat is still a lot of fun, a memory trip for adults who remember that one creepy old house in town about which everyone had a scary story to tell.
But the movie is not just a Ray Bradbury-like exercise in imaginative nostalgia. It’s also for and about real kids—not over sentimentalized and not overly cruded-up—just real kids who have the kinds of problems with parents, babysitters, neighbors and friends that perplex them without driving them to distraction. Kids don’t need help becoming distracted. That’s why they’re called “kids.”
The creepy house is directly across the street from DJ (voiced by Mitchell Musso), a boy on the cusp of being too old to go out for candy on Halloween night, one of the worst periods of any boy’s life. When he and his best pal Chowder (Sam Lerner) discover that old man Nebbercracker’s house is actually alive and eating anyone who approaches it, they get into a fight with Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi) and the cranky oldster collapses. Now that there is no one around to keep it under control, the house gets really hungry.
The boys enlist the reluctant aid of superior private school girl Jenny (Spencer Locke) to destroy the house’s heart and end its menace.
Co-executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, the movie shows more of Zemeckis’ influence in its sly ghost story sensibility. Director Gil Kenan displays more simpatico with some of Joe Dante’s work than he does with his producers’. Not in story but in attitude the movie reminds me a lot of Dante's “Matinee” and “Gremlins,” and most particularly of “Eerie, Indiana,” with its understanding that kids may go to adults for help but don’t really expect to get any because grown-ups just don’t see life the same way they do. One of the truest things ever said about the child/adult relationship was uttered offhandedly in “Matinee” when John Goodman’s character admitted that grown-ups just make it up as they go along.
Kevin James and Nick Cannon are the numbnuts cops, Maggie Gyllenhaal is the sardonic babysitter, Jason Lee is her musician boyfriend, John Heder is the whacked video game king, and Kathleen Turner is the house. All of them, plus Buscemi and the three kids in the leads cut loose and do nice work in the way that only voice acting allows you to.
Kenan, whose first film this is, does things with motion capture animation others who use the technique will be imitating for years, and the script by Dan Harmon, Rob Schrab, and Pamela Pettler is consistently amusing and only occasionally falls back on animated kids’ movie clichés.
Don’t skip this one because you think it’s just for children. Actually, the Winnie-the-Pooh crowd will probably be frightened by it.“Monster House” is that rarest of movie creatures—a movie that is not only for kids, but also for anyone who ever was one.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14660&reviewer=405
originally posted: 08/14/06 07:47:54
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Seattle Film Festival For more in the 2006 Seattle Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
21-Jul-2006 (PG)
DVD: 24-Oct-2006
UK
11-Aug-2006
Australia
14-Sep-2006
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