'Monster House' is filmed in the computer animation style of "The Polar Express," in which actors were filmed while wearing motion sensors, creating moving skeletons to animate with computers.
"The Polar Express" was more scary than entertaining due to the characters' chromelike skin, frozen hair and most of all, the soulless expression in the characters' eyes, and the same is true of "Monster House," which is visually stunning but not quite right.
At least "Monster House" is not a Christmas movie. It's a horror flick of sorts, although not in the ways it intends to be. It's far more frightening to see the close-ups of the children, who look like evil, clay-covered robots. The sequences that are intended to emit scares, such as one in which the house starts running around and chasing people, are too ridiculous to take seriously.
The content brushes up hard against the PG rating. There's ample bathroom humor, including a running joke that will doubtlessly influence kids to urinate in bottles, as well as several wincers that seem inappropriate for a lighthearted kiddie flick. One scene features a boy cringing under a hail of shattered glass. Another has an old man strangling a child, then keeling over to his apparent death.
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All this would be forgivable if the story was engaging, but the writing falters after a promising start. Two pre-adolescent boys, DJ (voiced by Michael Musso) and Chowder (Sam Lerner), lose a basketball in the yard of hated old man Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi), who snaps a toddler's tricycle in two in the opening sequence. Nebbercracker lives in the Monster House, a living, breathing entity that lashes out and kidnaps kids with its red carpet, sucks objects underground with its lawn, and uses its patio slats as teeth to chew down and gulp unsuspecting prey.
All the kids in the neighborhood know about the Monster House, but none of the parents believe their stories. I guess the adults just shrug it off when the Monster House eats one of their children, then simply set to making another one.
DJ and Chowder are fed up, however, and want the house dead. They're joined in the cause by Jenny (Spencer Locke), a neighborhood girl whom they meet and instantly befriend.
The film is plagued with anachronisms. One character carries around a pager — haven't seen one of those in a few years — making the setting appear to be in the 1990s, when JJ was the King of Beepers. Then a pointless interlude comes along involving Skull (Jon Heder), an obsessive video-game player who for no reason at all knows the only way to kill a monster house. Skull spills the unwieldly exposition while hunched over a machine in a circa-1970s arcade. There's also a little girl who sells candy door to door unsupervised without raising an eyebrow, recalling the 1960s or '70s.
In any era, "Monster House" would be an off-putting bore, acceptable as a kids film only as a punishment tool.
review
Monster House
HH
Rated: PG for scary images and sequences, thematic elements, some crude humor and brief language
Voice cast: Mitchell Musso, Sam Lerner, Steve Buscemi
Director: Gil Kenan
Family call: Too scary for young children
Running time: 91 minutes
Opens Friday at: Park Place, El Con, Century Park, Foothills, DeAnza, Desert Sky, Uptown
