Hotel Transylvania

Why does everybody hate Adam Sandler?

Director: Genndy Tartakovsky
Writers: Peter Baynham (Screenplay)
               Robert Smigel (Screenplay)
               Todd Durham (Story)
               Dan Hageman (Story)
               Kevin Hageman (Story)
Runtime: 92 minutes

Plot: Due to the persecution of the classic horror icons (and other monsters) Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) builds a hotel as a safe space for the monsters and his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez). On his daughters 118th birthday, a human Johnny (Andy Samberg) shows up and threatens his view of the humans altogether. 

I love this film but it's not always been that way. I remember a few years ago I was at the cinema and saw posters for this and thought it looked a bit shit. In all honesty, I wasn't even into films at that point in my life and only ever went to see things my friends asked me to go and see or if it was something that really grabbed my attention. Crazy times considering now all I do is sit around watching stuff to bitch about on the internet. Anyway, cut to a few years later and my friend's parents were away so I was staying with her because she had a crippling fear of being alone in the house. We had fun, we made food and baked cookies and had a brew and couldn't find a tv show to watch but this was on ITV2 so we thought fuck it, see what it's about. We thought it was just so funny, we loved it. A couple hours later we saw the trailer for the second one on Facebook and we thought damn, we seeing that when it's out if it's half as good as this one was. It was ok, not as good as this but was ok.

When I first saw this, I wasn't aware of any chronic Sandler bashing. I knew he'd made crap but I never thought that people would hate him regardless of whether he put out any good content. Looking at the 45%  critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the reviews it got, I'm amazed. Like I understand that comedy is subjective and all but...this is a good film. It's not groundbreaking or anything but it's fun, energetic, entertaining, the animation is pretty good, it's very fast but knows when to take a breath and be calm for its emotional moments. I really don't see how critics thought this was just trite to entertain a 5-year-old. But this is all just opinion based and everybody has a different opinion which is fine, I'm not going to slate people for not finding it funny, I'm just saying I don't find it fair that this film got bashed because Sandler was in it. I mean...it could have been worse. It could have had Rob Schnieder in it.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about my history with the film or the critic's feelings when it came out. I'm here to tell you what I thought about it when I watched it. So what did I think re-watching it? It was still funny, yes it has problems but what film doesn't? What are the problems? Let's get into it.

My first issue with this is how dead mothers in films, who die suddenly, seem to know they're going to die and create a heartfelt gift for their child's 18th birthday. It's kind of amazing to me, I get it when the mother is ill and dying and have time but it just seems a little coincidental that the mother's last words would be "I made this for our child, don't let them near it until their 18th and it has to be at a critical point in their development as a person and will change your relationship with our child forever." I don't know, this is just confusing to me.

Looking back on my notes and thinking back to it, that's the only issue I can think of, I'm sure I'll probably find more when I watch this again, I always do. So let's get into the positives.

I love the thing with Quasimodo and his rat, Esmeralda. Did he name the rat after his lost love? Is the rat an example of the woman in the book rather than the Disney adaptation? I don't know but it's a cool thing to put in there for those who love the book or the Disney film or both really. To be honest, I never even picked up on it until maybe the fourth or fifth time I watched this and I was kind of blown away by how I didn't notice it.

Steve Buschemi as the wolf-man is probably my favourite character in this, I mean, how can you not feel bad for this guy? He's got around 20-30 pups who don't respect him bar one, his wife is heavily pregnant with another litter of pups, he can't sleep because these pups are apparently overly energised insomniacs and as soon as he gets a second of sleep the alarm goes off. This poor guy just can't catch a break and even gets judged by his friends for eating a herd of sheep blocking the road because...that's what wolves do. I just love Buschemi anyway but  I love him in this role too.

This film also raises important questions, such as where exactly did this thing with Dracula saying "bleh bleh bleh" come from? I've not read the book in a while or watched the Hammer classics but I don't think it started there. Maybe it was in a comedy skit? SNL maybe? It probably started before SNL though...shit I don't know but this is important and I would like an answer to that.

Overall, I do love this film, the heartfelt moments are well done, the connections between the characters are believable, the humour is good, there are fart jokes for kids, there's character based humour for adults which is especially funny with the invisible man and wolf-man. It's kind of educational in the sense that it brings to light different monsters to kids attention, like some kids will know of Frankenstein but not a lot will know of the bride of Frankenstein. It's great, and something fun to show kids, especially around Halloween, y'know, with all those monsters. This is a pretty good project from Sandler and if you wanna hate on something of his, go hate Pixels, that's terrible and judging by the promotional shots of Sandler's face, even he wasn't all that happy with that one. Anyway, that's it for today, peace guys.

This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's great, I'm open to discussion and I'm always interested to hear how you feel about this film. This is also a critique which is considered "Fair Use" under the Copyright Act 1976. If you like this film then go and support its creators by buying the DVD or Bluray.