Monster House
I have a confession to make about this review. I saw "Monster House" for nothing. I also saw it at a late session, on a weeknight in an empty theatre, with a block of Lindt brand dark chocolate and lots of legroom, after a good dinner and a pleasant and productive day. In short, when I saw "Monster House" I saw it in just about the most perfect setting possible for any motion picture and, I am sad to say, I still thought that it was a pretty shit-house movie.
"Monster House" is the story of a young lad called DJ who is growing up in "any suburb USA" and who is unhealthily obsessed with the activities of the old man across the street. DJ considers the old man to be overly possessive of his front lawn, and perhaps dangerously interested in keeping the local children away from his house. DJ spend his days watching the old man through a telescope from his bedroom window. DJ's parents don't seem to care about this and go on a business trip leaving DJ in the care of a baby sitter who leaves him entirely unsupervised. On Halloween. Scary. Everyone knows that Halloween is the most evil day in human history and that bad things always happen on Halloween. Anyway, to cut a long story short, and as blind Freddy would expect, as soon as Dj's parents are out of the picture, everything goes apeshit. Terror abounds, but rest assured the forces of good triumph at the end of a surprisingly short 91 minutes of screen time. Then again, as my companion pointed out, the young ones have short attention spans, and need toilet, and the parents have busy lives and need mulled whiskey and a holiday.
"Monster House" is obviously aimed squarely at a market that could best be described as the 5-12 middle class, semi-supervised age group with wishy-washy agnostic parents. It could well please a family group of such people. There are, after all, no blatant endorsements of any religion, the underlying message of the film could well be rendered as "to understand is to forgive" and it is marginally exciting, marginally funny and not likely to tax the minds of even the least perceptive among us. Taken as an excuse to waste 91 minutes of your life and the life of your loved ones while eating popcorn, average family zombies will find nothing to be offended by and perhaps even some form of entertainment within it.
If, on the other hand, you have a brain, you might well find yourself squirming around in boredom from around the twenty minute mark and find yourself thinking unkind thoughts vaguely along the following lines.
"Why are comedy relief characters nearly always fat? Isn't that fattist? If I was a fat kid, would I feel discriminated against by this film?"
"If all the animators are going to do is simulate cookie cutter 'clean-cut' stereotypes who can't act, why don't they use real actors? Surely real, crap actors would be cheaper than CPU cycles?"
"Why does her hair look like that? Sort of solid, and plastic?"
"Was that a joke?"
And finally, the clincher:
"You know, I reckon that if one of the houses in my quiet suburban street tore two full size trees out of the garden and used them as legs to slam down the street after three screaming children while roaring like a tyrannosaurs rex in the middle of a pleasant summer evening ... I reckon that some of the neighbours might poke their heads out to see what was going on ... and call the air force."
Bluntly, ladies and germs, that was the problem. While the story of "Monster House" was adequate enough, and indeed skewed enough that I could not describe it as a purely cookie cutter operation, the script itself had enough holes in it to make a good fishing net and, if I had kids (which I don't) I would be rather pissed at the idea that I might end up showing them badly thought-out shit like this film as opposed to good, well-written and above all well THOUGHT product like say, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
The bottom line with "Monster House" is that it is alright. It's a product for the kids of parents who don't really care what crap their kids watch and just don't want to be too tortured if they have to watch it themselves and who, above all, don't want to be posed with curly questions from their offspring while in the car on the way home.
If you want you kids to grow up right, read a book with them, or play a game with them, or just hang out in a park with them in preference to this. You won't be missing anything. If you don't have children, avoid it, unless like me, you win free tickets and are just too damn masochistically lazy to get up and walk out.
(C)opyright Alex Rieneck, 2006.
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