Yes, I'm doing this one. I intend to
have The Green Inferno up
next week. But, the source material of this film still makes it
appropriate, even if it isn't really horror.
I was
fairly excited to see this movie. The first Hotel
Transylvania is a guilty
pleasure for me. It's dumb, but it's also sweet, and makes me laugh.
I was hoping that with this film they'd take what worked from the
first and build on it.
Sadly, I was quite
disappointed. It's not a horrible movie, but whatever made the
previous film work just wasn't there. For every ten jokes thrown
out, I found myself laughing at one. That wouldn't be awful in and
of itself, but the jokes that hit seemed to be throwaway gags, while
far worse material was built up for several minutes.
The joke that stood
out with me the most, because it was such wonderfully black humor,
was a cutaway to a monster magician. Jonathan felt that the hotel,
now hosting humans, should tone their magic show down to be less
gruesome. This joke lasts a few seconds, but could easily have been
used in another context, and stretched to three or four minutes until
the audience was howling with laughter at an ever more morbid show.
Instead, we get long bits on how Wayne the Werewolf acts like a dog.
The main conflict
of the movie is Dracula's attempts to turn Mavis and Jonathan's son
Dennis into a vampire, which can only happen before age five (now
young vampires suddenly age at the same rate as humans). In order to
do this, he convinces Jonathan to take Mavis to California as a
distraction, while Dracula and his posse show Dennis how to be a
“real” monster.
Jonathan is a major
problem with this entire franchise. The writers seem determined to
keep the focus on Mavis and Dracula, so Jonathan never evolves as a
character, and goes along with any harebrained scheme that Dracula
comes up with. When Mavis threatens to move to California for
Dennis' safety if he's truly a human, Jonathan should be completely
on her side. Instead, he sides with his father-in law. Jonathan
mentions briefly that he wants to stay at the hotel because he can
“be himself,” but this isn't really demonstrated. Jonathan seems
constantly happy no matter where he is, and coming to the hotel
seemed like just one more in a long string of adventures for him in
the past film. Why is it so important to him now?
Also, I don't think
I saw Jonathan interact with Dennis once in this movie. This is a
huge failing for a franchise that made Dracula such a nurturing male
character in the previous movie. The fact that Mavis never expresses
the slightest bit of anger at Jonathan, even when she finds out about
the plan, is utterly baffling.
Towards the end Mel
Brooks breaths some life into the film as Dracula's human-phobic
father Vlad, but he doesn't get nearly enough screen time. His
entire storyline seems almost tacked-on to give us a villain for the
film's climax...oh, and he isn't the villain, he just brought the
villain along with him in the form of a vampire-bat named Bela who
acts as a second-rate version of the first film's Quasimodo.
Apparently having Dennis' great-grandfather be evil would be too much
for the kiddies in the audience to endure.
I'd say wait for
this movie to hit Netflix. There are worse out there, and a few of
the gags work, but overall it does almost nothing with the material
it's given.
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