in a seemingly peaceful neighborhood there is a house, inhabited by a scary mean old man who terrorizes kids that step on his front lawn. dj is a kid who lives right across and he monitors everything that happens around the house. when his fat friend chowder's basketball ends up on the house's area of responsibility, they retrieve it only to come face to face with the gruesome geriatric ghoul himself... who suddenly has a heart attack and dies. soon, the house becomes haunted and not the way we all know haunted houses. seemingly possessed by the old man's ghost, the house roars to life with window eyes, wood plank teeth and a carpet tongue. who you gonna call? ghostbusters!
i really think that just about every kid, especially in my generation, had their own nebbercracker and their “adventure” stories to tell about him. there’s the old neighbor who owned a fruit tree and would come out with a shotgun if kids dared to climb it. (and then there’s that really bad one we usually see in the news, he who cant keep his hands to himself…) mine was my mother’s grumpy old father, but not as menacing as nebbercracker. that was eons ago, when he was still alive and strong, and me a young boy who still played in the dirt with my cousins. we weren’t really that afraid of him, making him mad was actually a bit of a laughing matter for us. remember those little firecrackers with string on either end that when you pulled them, the firecracker would go off? well, i tied one of those to the bathroom door while gramps was taking a bath and when he came out, boom! my cousins ratted me out and i got a good whacking then. anyways, the point of this flashback is that monster house is a movie that everyone can relate to, and it doesn’t just end with the villainous old man. take for example dj, damn i was that kid. all grown up but still treated like a baby. then there’s chowder, didn’t we all have that kind of friend at least once? and of course, pretty girl jenny, we all had (and still have) our jennies. that one girl you had the biggest crush on and gave you your first and subsequent pimples.
because of this, monster house is a refreshing take on the cgi genre. all we’ve seen recently are talking animals, talking cars, more talking animals, and talking ants (again?!). kids are eating up these movies like free candy and it was a brave move to take the path least treaded, the people behind monster house deserve kudos for that reason alone. and they came up with an animated movie that is almost real, where the kids acted like real kids, and the characters and situations mirrored the ones in our own lives. the only other movie i could compare this to is goonies, and that was live action. well, you know how most kiddie adventure movies are, kids are in trouble and the adults wont listen or believe them and so they face the perils themselves. a tried and tested formula put to good use the way we haven’t seen it. one different thing they did here was the person the kids turn to for guidance: a pizza guy named skull who has all the high scores in an arcade game. to them, he is the all-knowing one and the only one who would care about the sht they’re in. that’s some great writing if you ask me.
the voice acting was perfect. only ones i recognized were steve buscemi as nebbercracker and maggie gyllenhal as the babysitter, but that doesn’t mean the others weren’t great. because they were and they fit the roles like condoms. take for example pixar’s cars. cars don’t talk but after the movie, you might say that a talking car could sound like that. in monster house, dj and the rest of the characters sound exactly like they look and the way they would if you bumped into them in real life. and i need not even discuss how good the animation is, every cgi movie that comes out after the last one just ups the ante that im guessing there will be virtually no use for real actors in the near future (which i honestly hope never happens, at least not until jessica alba bares it all). for me, chowder seemed the most realistic of them. his movements were just… right. there’s a very noticeably big difference between a cartoony turn of the head and humanly real turn of the head. chowder, and the rest of the “cast”, had the latter. my only gripe about this movie are the unreal parts, like the inside of the house (the outside, i bought. but the inside was just too much. an uvula?!) and the unbelievable climactic end sequences. they should have retained the realism a bit more. good twist ending though. oh and if you pay attention, there are some good jokes in there that only an adult would get.
this movie was the brainchild of a guy fresh out of film school. good job dude. plus, he was backed up by the best in the business. robert zemeckis and steven spielberg? ‘nuff said.
the good: animation, story, and that freakin house.
the bad: the house’s interior and the over-the-top sequences.
the ugly: the old man’s wife.
the score: 8 bottles of urine.
home skiz home
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