Nude Memphis Movie Reviews: Hotel Transvylvania and Frankenweenie

This past weekend I saw 2 Halloween movies. So how about I tell you all about them?

Hotel Transylvania

Count Dracula decides to build a hotel just for monsters, a kind of luxury retreat away from humans. He has a very young daughter who he very much wants to protect from mobs with pitchforks and torches and he feels that his hidden hotel is the perfect way to do that. So he orders a team of ghouls and zombies to build it and then he and his child move in and begin doing business.

For what appears to be a few hundred years all goes well and his hotel is very popular with the monsters of the world. They love the "no humans" aspect of it and return each year with their families. Meanwhile, Dracula's daughter has grown up a bit. She is now a 'teenager' of 118, an adolescent in vampire years, and very good looking. She wants to leave and see the world. Count Dracula is terrified of what might happen if she goes out into the world, and he does all that he can to prevent it.

On the night of her birthday, a party is scheduled. But she wants only to go out and see the world. So Count Dracula has his zombies construct a phony village. He tells his daughter that he will permit her to visit this nearby village so that she might have the opportunity to experience the world of humans for herself. She flies down to the village, only to be attacked by zombies disguised as regular humans. They put a good scare into her and send her flying home again, thoroughly traumatized, just as her father, The Count, had hoped. When she arrives home again, upset by the abuse, Count Dracula comforts her and says "you see, I told you it is terrible out there. You should stay here with me forever and be safe."

Meanwhile, Dracula's zombies are returning to the hotel through the secret gate. A teenage boy, out hiking and lost, ends up wandering in through the gate with the zombies. Hotel guests are arriving for the birthday party of Dracula's daughter and the place is packed. As soon as the teenage boy enters the lobby, mixed in with the zombies and guests, Dracula spots him. He panics at the possibility of his guests seeing a human in his exclusive 'human free' hotel, and pounces on the boy as discretely as he can, dragging him off into a private room where he warns him that he has to leave immediately.

Is that your daughter?

Dracula's daughter pops in, looking for her father, and immediately wants to know who the boy is. He's the only 'guest' who appears near her age and she wants to get to know him.

Young love

The boy ends up helping/interfering with the plans for her birthday party. Count Dracula has always completely controlled all the details of every single one of her parties. But he's much older than her and his idea of a wild party involves bingo and old monsters floating calmly in the pool. The boy stirs up excitement everywhere he goes, inciting a game of chicken amongst all the monsters, naturally taking on Dracula's attractive daughter right away. His 'interference' results in the best birthday party she's ever had and the guests enjoy it much more than all the previous parties. This annoys Count Dracula, a control freak, to no end.

I'm not going to give away the ending, but it's a pretty standard love story so I'm assuming you can guess how it goes from here. Ah, young love! The bottom line is this: despite the fact that this is an Adam Sandler film, and Adam Sandler provides the voice of Count Dracula, I still liked the movie. Despite the kick to the groin of the suit of armor, which responded "why does this hurt me", I'm still going to give this movie 4 stars. It's definitely worth seeing.

Tim Burton's for-Disney Halloween film, Frankenweenie, is a black and white, stop-action retelling of the old Frankenstein story.  Only in this version, Dr. Frankenstein is a young boy with a talent for science. His classmates at school are some of the strangest group of oddballs ever. Igor is a hunchbacked boy in his class who desperately wants to win the science fair that the brand new science teacher, a dead ringer for Boris Karloff, has just announced at the start of the film.

Frankenstein is a loner, having no friends and choosing instead to go home every day and play with his dog, Sparky, and conduct experiments. His parents worry that he spends too much time alone without friends, so his father signs him up for baseball. While playing in his first game, he hits a ball across the road behind center field and begins running the bases. But his dog, Sparky, sees him hit the ball and immediately takes off after it. Sparky runs across the street, retrieves the ball, and begins heading back with it. Just then he is hit by a car and dies.

Frankenstein is devastated by the death of his dog. The following day in science class, his science teacher demonstrates how electricity can still travel the network of nerves in the dead body of a frog and cause the body to move. But the demonstration gives Frankenstein an idea for resurrecting his dog.

From here the resurrection of the dog follows the standard Frankenstein story. But after this, things get truly interesting. The neighbor girl's poodle is friendly with Sparky, and had noticed when he was missing from the backyard. After he is resurrected he returns to the backyard where the poodle next door sees him. They touch noses through the fence and a bolt of electricity passes between them, creating a lightning-bolt-shaped white streak in her hair and giving us The Bride of Frankenstein. It was a great gag.

Throughout the movie, other monster movie references are made, including a giant monster turtle reminiscent of Gamera, the flying, spinning, fire-breathing turtle from the Godzilla films. All the old monster movie references were very cleverly done and hilarious. In fact, the entire movie was well done and pretty hilarious.

I highly recommend Frankenweenie. I give it 4 stars.

 

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