NOTE: Minor spoilers. I doubt if you will watch it anyhow.
If only Bobby Pickett had known the horrors his classic song would inspire, perhaps we would never have his song "Monster Mash" played every Halloween. More importantly, this inept cartoon movie would never have been made. Now, I know that cartoon movies for kids are often judged on a different tangent than all other films, but there is just no way I can grit my teeth and give this awful film a break. The public must be warned.
"Monster Mash," and I mean the film, is about as brainless as you can get. The plot involves three aging ghouls (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman) that, after making fools of themselves on national television, have lost the ability to be scary. They are taken to a monster court where a skeleton judge orders them to scare one family by the end of the next day. The family are the Tinklemeisters. Dad is a dog groomer, Mom is a neat-freak, Spike is a boy-genius that doesn't speak but whistles, and Stella is just there to talk when Spike can't as she has no character of her own. After a few lame attempts to scare the Tinklemeisters, the trio up and whisks them away to their castle. Not surprisingly, Spike is the only one that is not fearful. The fact that three of the four have been scared worries the Grim Reaper, who prosecuted the case, so he sends three modern monsters to the castle, which immediately seems like a real stupid and counter-productive thing to do.
Cartoon movies that try to have fun with the Halloween genre are open to great satire, but "Monster Mash" pumps out lame scene after lame scene. The courtroom scene is full of lame lines. For example, everyone refers to the skeleton judge as "Your Ogre." That might be funny if the judge was really an OGRE. The animation feels like it came right out of a Saturday morning cartoon show, but without the fun feeling that it is Saturday. But by far the most excruciating thing about it are the songs. The famous title song is just thrown in the beginning just to be in the movie, and the rest of them are downright awful songs, particularly the one sung by the Tinklemeisters called "Waiting for Spike." Why is it that Disney has forced all other animation companies, in this case DIC, to think they have to throw in songs? As a word of warning, I strongly urge parents to not watch this with their kids. Actually, don't give it to your kids, either. There are only tow good things about this. One is that there was one bit of creativity in one of the modern monsters, a parody of Jason Voorhees, called Freddie Spaghetti, whose head is made of matter-eating noodles. The other good thing is that it is short, clocking at a little over an hour. But in the version I saw, DIC threw in an episode of Jim Varney's "Hey Vern, It's Ernest" from 1988. I can't for the life of me figure out why DIC did this, other than a flat-out attempt at redemption. But they were beyond that long ago. DIC has created a monster. Zantara's score: 2 out of 10.
If only Bobby Pickett had known the horrors his classic song would inspire, perhaps we would never have his song "Monster Mash" played every Halloween. More importantly, this inept cartoon movie would never have been made. Now, I know that cartoon movies for kids are often judged on a different tangent than all other films, but there is just no way I can grit my teeth and give this awful film a break. The public must be warned.
"Monster Mash," and I mean the film, is about as brainless as you can get. The plot involves three aging ghouls (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman) that, after making fools of themselves on national television, have lost the ability to be scary. They are taken to a monster court where a skeleton judge orders them to scare one family by the end of the next day. The family are the Tinklemeisters. Dad is a dog groomer, Mom is a neat-freak, Spike is a boy-genius that doesn't speak but whistles, and Stella is just there to talk when Spike can't as she has no character of her own. After a few lame attempts to scare the Tinklemeisters, the trio up and whisks them away to their castle. Not surprisingly, Spike is the only one that is not fearful. The fact that three of the four have been scared worries the Grim Reaper, who prosecuted the case, so he sends three modern monsters to the castle, which immediately seems like a real stupid and counter-productive thing to do.
Cartoon movies that try to have fun with the Halloween genre are open to great satire, but "Monster Mash" pumps out lame scene after lame scene. The courtroom scene is full of lame lines. For example, everyone refers to the skeleton judge as "Your Ogre." That might be funny if the judge was really an OGRE. The animation feels like it came right out of a Saturday morning cartoon show, but without the fun feeling that it is Saturday. But by far the most excruciating thing about it are the songs. The famous title song is just thrown in the beginning just to be in the movie, and the rest of them are downright awful songs, particularly the one sung by the Tinklemeisters called "Waiting for Spike." Why is it that Disney has forced all other animation companies, in this case DIC, to think they have to throw in songs? As a word of warning, I strongly urge parents to not watch this with their kids. Actually, don't give it to your kids, either. There are only tow good things about this. One is that there was one bit of creativity in one of the modern monsters, a parody of Jason Voorhees, called Freddie Spaghetti, whose head is made of matter-eating noodles. The other good thing is that it is short, clocking at a little over an hour. But in the version I saw, DIC threw in an episode of Jim Varney's "Hey Vern, It's Ernest" from 1988. I can't for the life of me figure out why DIC did this, other than a flat-out attempt at redemption. But they were beyond that long ago. DIC has created a monster. Zantara's score: 2 out of 10.