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The plot is one of those things of simple and elegant beauty that is so catchy that you may find yourself wondering why no one every thought of it before now. In a typical Spielbergian suburb, young DJ (Mitchel Musso) has the misfortune to live across the street from the rambling old house belonging the nefarious Mr Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi), a cranky old man who has made it his life’s mission to confiscate any toys, kites, balls or other kiddie ephemera that finds its way onto his lawn. As the story opens, DJ, whose parents have just left for the weekend and placed him in the care of skanky babysitter Zee (Maggie Gyllenhaal), is playing basketball with pal Chowder (Sam Lerner) when their ball takes an unfortunate hop onto Nebbercracker’s lawn. In a rare bit of boldness, DJ goes to retrieve it and is confronted by the man himself, who promptly drops from the exertion and is taken away with a sheet over his head and no siren from the ambulance. This is bad enough, but DJ later get a phone call in the middle of the night that seems to be coming from Nebbercracker’s house even though there is no one there.

DJ and Chowder begin to investigate (in pure “Rear Window” fashion) and they soon become convinced that the house itself has somehow come to life and is possessed with Nebbercracker’s spirit–especially when a dog appears to leave a nasty surprise on the lawn and receives an even nastier one in exchange. Of course, no one–not Zee, nor her sleazy boyfriend (Jason Lee) or a couple of dopey cops (Kevin James and Nick Cannon)–will believe that their story is anything other than a Mountain Dew-inspired hallucinations. They do find one ally in Jenny (Spencer Locke), the pretty and popular girl whom they both save (and immediately crush on) when she picks the wrong house to attempt to sell candy to. Before long, the three of them find themselves inside the house and discover that it is really and truly alive–it even comes complete with a chandelier that serves as the uvula. (“Wow, so it’s a girl house!”) While trying to find the heart of the house in order to stop it before it can destroy the neighborhood–oh yeah, it is also Halloween, the one night when kids would cheerfully approach a house they would otherwise avoid like the plague–the three discover the real secrets behind both the house and Mr. Nebbercracker’s lifelong behavior towards the neighborhood.

Watching “Monster House,” I immediately found myself transported back to the old Showplace Theaters in Crystal Lake, Illinois–the place where I spent a good chunk of my youth watching such films as “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Poltergeist,” “Gremlins” and “Ghostbusters.” These were films that were aimed at younger audiences, of course, but didn’t come off as though they were. In these films, they realized that kids could handle movies that didn’t have all of the genuine thrills and scares lopped out of them in an effort to secure a family-friendly rating as too many of them do these days. Perhaps because it has been co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, two of the men who specialized in just those kinds of films back in the 1980's, “Monster House” has that same sort of appeal–some parents may wring their hands over whether the film is too intense for their children while the kids will be having too much of a blast watching it to notice. The film is obviously aimed for family audiences and younger kids (with plenty of gross-out jokes to tickle them to death)but it still includes scenes with some genuine tension and creepiness to them–the trip into the basement that reveals the full secret of the house builds a nice sense of suspense and while we are fairly certain that our heroes won’t perish during the final standoff, they are put through a wringer that is more perilous than usually for a film of the particular genre. (It does try to soften the blow by providing a happy fate for some of the characters during the end credits but those bits feel so out-of-place that I imagine that director Gil Kenan only put them in under extraordinary duress.)

Visually, “Monster House” is a delight throughout–although the film utilizes the same kind of motion-capture technology that Zemeckis unsuccessfully deployed in “The Polar Express,” the wrinkles that made that earlier work so creepy to look at have been smoothed over and the resulting film is so seamless and beautiful that I didn’t even notice the process until I saw some clips on TV later on. (That said, the Luddite in me does wish that someone could have figured out a way to pull off this film as a live-action feature–imagine what Joe Dante, perhaps as a companion piece to his live-action cartoon contribution to the “Twilight Zone” movie, could have done with the material with the power of Spielberg and Zemeckis behind him.) However, unlike too many recent animated films, where the visual glories are pretty much the entire show, the look of the film is just one of the factors working in its favor. At the risk of making a cruddy pun, I have to point out that one of the key elements to the success of “Monster House” is that it has a strong screenplay serving as its foundation that deftly juggles knockabout comedy and Rube Goldberg-esque action sequences while cannily exploiting the fact that every neighborhood has one creepy house that no one, young or old, dares go near after dark.

The three kids at the center of the story are funny and engaging and I especially liked the way that the two boys found themselves at times less terrified by the notion of a house that eats people than of those weird stirrings brought on by the arrival of Jenny. And while this film, like most animated works these days, features a cast of well-known actors, they seem to have been hired less for their marquee value and more for their ability to actually bring something to the party. Of them, I especially like the work of Steve Buscemi, who is fearsome early on and oddly sympathetic once we learn a little more about him (his reading of the line “So I finished the house” is a marvel that manages to be both darkly funny and genuinely tragic), and Kathleen Turner, about whose contributions I will say no more except to mention that they are unforgettable. The only dud in the cast is Nick Cannon, whose scaredy-cat cop lurches far closer into Stepin Fetchit territory that one might expect from a film made in 2006.

Other than that, “Monster House” is that rarest of cinematic creatures–a genuine surprise and delight from start to finish that doesn’t blow all the best bits in the trailer. Kids will be delighted with its mix of laughs and chills while adults will be taken back to the favorite movies of their own youth. This isn’t just one of the best family films of the year or one of the best animated films–this is just one of the best films of the year period.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14660&reviewer=389
originally posted: 07/21/06 14:11:05
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