Hotel Transylvania 2

2015

Mavis (Dracula’s daughter) married a human. Now she has a son. Drac and all his monster buds hope the boy will be a vampire too, but he has yet to sprout fangs and there is a chance he could be human. Behind the back of Mavis Grandpa Drac takes his grandson on some wild adventures hoping to get his fangs to pop put. Instead it just puts him in danger and Mavis threatens to move. Eventually the grandson gets his fangs, saves the day and all is normal as it can be.

The negatives- Mavis comes across as being very sour for most of the movie which was hard to take since she was so likable in the first one.

The positives- The humor was very much similar to the first film which I also enjoyed. I thought the monster references were great. Overall the film looked very good.

Both my kids liked it and said it was almost as good as the first one. I agree with my kids on this one. Definitely worth seeing if you liked the first  one.

Goosebumps

2015

In this world author R.L. Stine disappeared after being a successful author of kid’s horror books. This goofy teenager falls for the girl next door. He and his goofier new friend end up finding out that the girl’s dad is R.L. Stine (Jack Black). They also find out he keeps the monster of the books locked away in the original manuscripts. So no one messes with them and nothing bad happens .. the end. Yeah, right the goofy teens let the monsters out and Slappy the ventriloquist dummy burns the books so they can’t go back into them. The monsters go on a big rampage across the town. Stine says he has to write a new book with all the monsters in it where they are defeated in order to get them back in. Slappy tries to stop him, the kids try to stop Slappy and there’s a bunch of other stuff thrown in there including Stine’s daughter been created by him writing him up. Everything turns out fine or does it?

The negatives-Younger kids might find the relationships to be too sappy. The ending ties things up awfully quickly. As a fan of the original book series I felt like I only a sprinkling of the monsters I was expecting to see.

The positives- Glad to see any version of Goosebumps and they did a decent job reviving it in this form. Jack Black was a solid fit for playing Stine ( note – look for the real Stine making a cameo as a teacher at the end of the film). I thought the monsters looked pretty darn good as they largely went by the images from the covers of the 90’s books.

My son said it was good and he really liked the Abominable snowman. My daughter stopped watching after like 30 minutes and said she didn’t like Goosebumps as much as she used to. I thought it was overall decent and might would buy it if it ever comes to the $5 bin.