While this J.A. Bayona (“The Impossible”) directed effort (based on a best-selling book by Patrick Ness), A Monster Calls, is a wonderful visual and visceral experience (and currently has critics fawning all over themselves), I, for one, can only wonder for whom this film was made. It’s certainly too dark and foreboding for children —…
In the summer of 2007, I sat at the drive-in theater, waiting excitedly for Michael Bay’s “Transformers” to begin (it was my childhood on screen! Peter Cullen’s voice!!), and I was blown away by a trailer that no one saw coming. Choppy home-movie footage showed us a New York party that descended into chaos when…
Like the infamous Roach Motel, once you check into Hotel Transylvania 2, you don’t check out. At least your brain doesn’t check back in until the concluding credits roll after its 90ish minute running time. Getting back together with former SNL writer (and creator of the often-hilarious cartoon parodies, “TV Funhouse”) Robert Smigel, Adam Sandler…
As a screen icon, Dracula has been reinvented over and over again. And many more overs. He’s been everyone from Bela Lugosi to Judas Iscariot and fought veteran vampire killers that range from the brilliant Buffy to the middling Blade at his lamest. He’s drawn the acute attention of such filmmaking masters as Murnau and…
If Mary Shelley were alive today she would cry at the sight of I, Frankenstein, the latest movie that wrongly tries to make an action hero of a classic universal monster. Thankfully, though, she is dead, so turning over in her grave is the most we can expect to see from her. Adapted from a…
If you thought Frankenstein’s monster was just some slow, plodding brute, then you need to watch the trailer for Lionsgate’s I, Frankenstein. Traveling the Earth through the centuries he’s bore witness to many events but never involved himself. That is until two clans — one of great gargoyle beasts and the other of demonlike creatures…
While not reaching the heights of the original (or other Pixar classics such as “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” or “Ratatouille,” among others), Monsters University, a prequel to “Monsters, Inc.,” is a more than decent entry into the lexicon and is certainly light year’s ahead of the last two studio productions, “Cars 2” and “Brave.” It…
