Movie Review of "Monster House"
Rated PG
By CK Movie Kid Jonathan Lack
Rating: * (out of 4)

It's sad when the best thing that can be said about a movie is, "I've seen worse." "Monster House" is one of these movies.

One of the film's biggest flaws is that it does not know what its audience is. It can't appeal to younger children for the scare factor. Adults will find it gross and completely pointless, and teens will find it cheesy and would much rather head over to the latest "real" horror film. "Monster House" was conceived, written, and animated with no firm audience in mind.

The overly simplistic story: Two friends believe a house across the street is evil and is eating people alive, so they decide to try and defeat the evil house.

And that's the story in one sentence. It would be nearly impossible to tell anymore, as that's the entire story right there. The toddlers in the theater figured it out easily enough, they just didn't want to stay on account of the creepiness of the visuals.

But the visuals of the haunted house could only be creepy to younger children. To teens and adults, they're completely cheesy. What was creepy in the animation to me was the humans in the movie. CGI films have never animated a human well, except for the exceptional "Polar Express" film of 2004. It's why animators use animals in films. Humans are impossible to make look right, and Monster House proves it. They tried for realism, and it came out...creepy.
And while many other critics have been praising the movie for being original, I cannot see where they are coming from. The movie does not have a second of originality in it. The very premise of a house attacking people in the Halloween season, its been done many, many times before. Maybe not always with a house, but we've seen the basis of this story dozens of times.
And the "plot twist" at the end, if you can call it that, is all about a dead loved one coming back and haunting people in an alternate form. This idea has been beaten to death so many times I really wanted to walk out of the theater at this point.

Every last character was a stereotype. The fat kid was a stupid clutz who never did anything right, the thin kid was smart, obviously, and brave, and the prep-school girl was smart and totally stuck up. The teenage baby-sitter was totally irresponsible and had a boyfriend who was carrying around an alcohol bottle and getting drunk. The parents were incompetent and never listened to their kid. Stereotypes. The number one sign of unoriginality.

I would not recommend this movie to anyone, though, if you must see it, do not take children younger than 6 or 7. There's crude and gross humor, violence, scary imaging and language, and alcohol references.

So spend your money elsewhere-there are plenty of other children's movies out, and plenty that the whole family can enjoy. Monster House is not one of them. (July, 2006)