Monster House (2006)

Pretty Good

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The reason for my rating is that it was kinda crappy animation. you could clearly see the cuts between scenes. The reason that I don't give it 1/2 in a rating, is because it hides some small details, like when you could see, when the house where first defeated, you could see the box that contained dynamite where The house originally was. The character arc was surprisingly developed with the two perverts fighting over the same redhead. There were some dirty jokes in there, like when Chowder said "I know that place. There's a taco bar at the corner of that street!" "I hate Mexican food," said Jenny "Yeah, me too!" Chowder proceeded to say. If I could give it a 4,5 at the rating, I would.

I was baffled by the graphics and what they got an animated movie to do. I'm so curious about what goes into the making of an animated movie such as this. I've been backstage at Disney to watch how they created an animated film years ago, probably 80's. But I haven't been recently and it would be intriguing to see how it's done and put all together. What are the easy parts and what are the difficult parts, ya know? This movie is cute, but a bit far-fetched. It's still good though because of the quality of the animation these days and what they can do with it. Impressed! Great work! This is a good movie for small children to watch, particularly around the Halloween Holiday.

With shades of October classics like Monster Squad, Monster House is a halloween movie just about anyone can enjoy. Though on the outside it may look like a "kids movie," it doesn't pull its punches and isn't afraid to put our heroes in legitimate danger, leading to the same sense of joy one would get when watching a movie like The Goonies.Part of what makes it such a joy is the movie's overarching mystery regarding the titular house itself. The secret to successful horror is to keep the audience guessing, and Monster House is great at this. There's a few big mysteries lurking inside the Monster House, and the movie takes its time building a tangible, winding suspense. The monster itself is absolutely awesome in motion, and some of the most creative use of visual effects out there.But... about that. This is one of the movies to use Robert Zemeckis' "performance capture" technology, which is an overly complex, incredibly expensive way to take real people on real sets and digitize their movements into computer animation. The more stylized, claymation-esque aesthetic of Monster House makes it less creepy looking than Zemeckis' other movies (The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol) but it still veers too close to the uncanny valley in some scenes. Characters can vary wildly between looking like puppets, cartoon characters, and unsettlingly realistic people in a way that can look a little gross. Without getting in to a debate about the value of real animators and hand-crafted animation versus using a computer to auto-digitize the movement of physical actors, I'll just say that this performance capture stuff continues to look wholly unnecessary in Monster House, but it doesn't spoil the movie. It just didn't need it.Monster House didn't just exceed my expectations, it juked around them like a football player. Every time I thought I knew right where this movie was going, it took a left turn, and kept me entertained the whole time. It's a kids movie that almost feels on the edge of not being suitable for children -- and if you ask me, those are the best kind.

When I first saw this movie, I was about nine or ten and I walked in on my younger brothers and neighbor watching it. At first, I refused to watch it because I deemed it "too scary", but I allowed myself to sit down for 5 minutes. I ended up watching the rest of it and loving it. I turn seventeen next Sunday and this movie to this day is still one of my absolute favorites. WARNING: SPOILERS: The only thing that truly scared me about this movie when I was younger was the haunted phone call and the eerie moaning on the other end. I was worried that whenever I answered the phone, the same thing would happen to me. The final 20 minutes of this movie are very intense. Personally, I don't remember being scared of it when I was younger, but take caution if you watch this with young kids.