Average material; it wastes the cool thing of having tons of classic monsters together

Rating: 5/10 (3 October 2012)

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA wasn't as clever (nor as fun) as I imagined. I even went for it during my birthday; since 2009 I've been celebrating my birthday by going to the cinema and this year I had three potential choices: THE WATCH, DREDD 3D and this one. It was a question of time that I ended watching "Transylvania" over THE WATCH, which was the one I truly wanted to enjoy. Anyway, I have to mention that one of the trailers I got to watch was the one of the upcoming Disney film WRECK-IT RALPH; it seems that "Ralph" will not miss the chance to deliver really clever material out of a mash-up of classic characters (video games characters, like Nintendo's Bowser, in that case). "Transylvania", on the contrary, missed its chance with the classic "Universal Monsters" (Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man) and some others monsters.
It's clear that the whole horror atmosphere was the reason I wanted to check this one out. Here's a piece of advice for anyone who wants to watch it as well as a horror fan, looking for some nice and fun references or something like that: watch this year's PARANORMAN instead, or something like MONSTER HOUSE (Gil Kenan, 2006), as there's pretty much nothing worthy of admiration here.
Well, there's something nice in the last section of the film and I will explain it to make a point. The core of the storyline is that Dracula (voice of Adam Sandler – definitely his best or better said, his only honorable work in the last years) built a place for any monster that wanted some peace; a hotel nowhere nears a human civilization. So we have monsters that basically don't know humans; the nice thing comes when they finally go out and get to see some horror fans (in a way this thing is like that with Johnny Depp, as an 18th-century vampire, waking up in the seventies, from DARK SHADOWS); eventually, there's a terrific joke on the TWILIGHT thing: we have Dracula (or "Drac", as he is referred during the whole movie) totally disappointed after getting to see how humans represent the monsters by watching some TWILIGHT!
Good stuff, right? However, the point I want to make is that there's always a problem when a movie that judges how awful the horror genre has been treated lately is itself making, for instance, a Kanye West sort-of rapper out of Dracula. I mean, I get it, I get that right from the first scene of the movie we are going to watch a different version of Dracula, as, after all, this is a kid's flick (in fact, we have Dracula as a single father!). However, the whole thing is sort- of annoying, even if you accept it as something completely unrelated to the classic monsters.
It's one of those, like the last MADAGASCAR, with lots of things going on. There's a lot of noise but nothing that truly gets you or that makes you laugh hard (there are, nevertheless, some funny bits involving the Invisible Man). That's on one hand, and on the other we have a formulaic story about an over-protective father and love. In conclusion, HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is average material that totally wastes its main attraction.
*Watched it on 02 October, 2012