Some ideas look great on the Hollywood drawing board — and that’s exactly where Gil Kenan’s Monster House should have stayed. I’m sure it all looked great on paper: a film about a malevolent house that eats young kids and pets, with the motion-capture technique used in The Polar Express to bring it to life. With Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg serving as producers, House appears to be a ready-made money machine. Unfortunately, this exercise comes off like an exercise, a technological feat that’s great fun to look at but lacks soul.
The biggest problem with the film is that it does very little in the way of setting up its premise or allowing us to get to know its characters. The viewer is dropped immediately into suburbia in the middle of Anywhere, U.S.A., and introduced to a couple of kids whom even tykes in the audience will be able to peg as stereotypes, if their vocabulary is broad enough. DJ (Mitchel Musso) is the typical boy on the edge of teendom, still gawky and clumsy but eager to be taken seriously. His best friend, Chowder (Sam Lerner), is a complete spaz.
DJ can’t seem to get any authority figure to believe him when he says that the creepy falling-down house across the street is alive and eats kids. DJ and Chowder have seen it with their own eyes; they were almost victims themselves. The only one who believes them is the precocious Jenny (Spencer Locke), who joins them in their plan to infiltrate and destroy the house and liberate all who are trapped within. With Halloween coming, their task is urgent.
The initial scenes, in which we see the house glaring at kids and gulping down tykes with its long carpet-runner tongue, are wicked fun. The house is a real character.
Unfortunately, the kids aren’t. DJ, Jenny, and Chowder are not unique in any way, and, as a result, I really didn’t care whether they got out of the house alive. Even though the motion-capture technology had a certain magical quality to it in Express, here it seems to render the characters stiff and lifeless. In fact, House reminded me of the old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials in which stop-action animation was used to make stiff miniatures move, say, just like miniature stiff models. With a pedestrian story, so-so animation, and a story that’s thin and unengaging, there’s little magic in this House.
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2006.
