"Hey, may the best monster win!"

Rating: 8/10 (12 November 2011)

When I was a kid, the monster I feared wasn't under the bed or in the closet. It was at the top of the attic stairs, and I'll let you in on a little secret. It was a giant gorilla. I just knew it was there, but I would gird myself to go up to prove I could overcome my fear. Once there, I would tempt fate by rotating the hand on an old clock my grandmother had stored up there, and it would bong out it's forbidding chime. Let me tell you, for an eight year old, it was SCARY.
Anyway, I'm writing this review some fifty or so years later, so I got beyond the scary part. But you know, I still think about it whenever I'm at my folks' house and go up those daunting stairs. I move around pretty freely now and that old clock is gone, so I'm no longer petrified. Lending some credence to the central theme of this picture, I watched it today with my three year old granddaughter, and you know, in some cases it might be true - "There is nothing more deadly or toxic than a human child". But not my granddaughter, she's just a sweet kid. And she liked the movie. So that's good enough for me.
Of course, watching the movie with a kid has it's distractions, so I may have missed a few things. But I'll tell you what, I got the biggest kick out of the yellow snow cone reference and the HAZMAT team going by the CDA (Child Detection Agency) that came in to sanitize poor George who got a kid's sock stuck to his fur. Quite coincidentally, the film I watched just before this one was "Attack of the Crab Monsters", so the appearance of one Mr. Waternoose was more than serendipitous. There were other good bits too, like the nod to Ray Harryhausen and the idea of matching every kid with their ideal monster. I guess for me that would be King Kong. Go figure.