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Canberra Today 13°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review: ‘Hotel Transylvania’ (PG) **

THE location for this animation is the castle where Count Dracula provides resort facilities where all the fictional monsters, scarers and other nasties of literature can come for a weekend away from it all, unthreatened by their perceived common enemy, humans.

It’s colourful, vigorous, but unfortunately, the screenplay doesn’t quite know which age group is its target. The characters are not what kids of single-digit and perhaps early-double digit age are likely to have encountered in their reading or TV viewing. Even older folk might find it difficult to identify who they are. And the inclusion of most of its monstrous characters, especially Quasimodo, in the dramatis personae simply flies in the face of their fictional realities.

On the night of the bash Dracula is throwing for the 118th birthday of his daughter Mavis, whom he loves dearly, human hiker Jonathan enters the castle. What follows is predictable, delivered in a raucous, noisy, dramatic environment stinking with American cultural icons and values. I found that distasteful in a film exported to a world market. Not even the finale, with humans and monsters in reconciliation, outweighs that.

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Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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