Old vampire tricks abound in ‘Hotel Transylvania: Transformania’
Dracula is up to his very old vampire tricks in “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania,” the latest, somewhat dim iteration in the computer-generated “Hotel Transylvania” series that began in 2012.
Adam Sandler and Sony Pictures Animation parted ways for reasons unknown before the making of this fourth in the series.
Sandler voiced the character of Count Dracula in the first three films and served as an executive producer. Voiced by Brian Hull of “Monster Pets: A Hotel Transylvania Short Film” (2021), this new Dracula sounds not unlike the Sandler version.
At the outset, the Count is planning on retiring and making the announcement at a big party he has thrown for his friends and family, where zombies wait tables.
The friends and family include, of course, his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez), his annoying, human, skater-boy son-inlaw Jonathan aka Jonny (Adam Samberg), his fiance Ericka Van Helsing (Kathryn Hahn) and his fellow monster buddies Frank aka the Frankenstein monster (Brad Abrell) and his bride Eunice (Fran Drescher), Wayne aka the Wolf Man (Steve Buscemi), Griffin the Invisible Man (David Spade) and Murray aka the Mummy (Keegan-Michael Key). Don’t forget “Blobby” aka the Blob.
The trouble begins when Drac gets, uhh, cold feet and changes his announcement, forcing Jonny to go to Van Helsing’s lab in the hotel’s basement and agree to be transformed into a monster, actually a bluegreen and yellow dragon, with a crystal “monsterification” gun invented by Van Helsing (Jim Gaffigan).
The same device accidentally turns Dracula into his human form, doing the same for his friends, before it is broken. To replace it, human Dracula and monster Jonny must go to South America in a monster-piloted airplane to find another crystal in a cave in a distant rain forest. When they realize what has happened, Mavis, Ericka and Drac’s buddies and their families follow along in Ericka’s steampunk dirigible.
That’s the set-up. The execution features the usual “Hotel Transylvania” lame jokes, pratfalls and sight gags (juggling chainsaws, anyone?). Jonny is in the tiresome habit of referring to his father-in-law as “cranky fangs.”
The human Dracula can be exposed to the sun and has a pollen allergy. Stop me if any of this sounds funny to you.
Directors Derek Drymon and Jennifer Kluska (“Monster Pets: A Hotel Transylvania Short Film”) keep the action moving along and often have very little going on in the backgrounds. Writers Amos Vernon, Nunzio Randazzo and Genndy Tartakovsky, the latter of “Samurai Jack” fame, have somehow managed to make Drescher unfunny, nothing short of a miracle.
We get mosquito jokes, piranha jokes and a toasted marshmallow bit. Anything gooey or slimy is funny fodder. It’s gratifying that the Dracula in these “Hotel Transylvania” films has been based on the character played, and in fact created by, the, yes, hypnotic Bela Lugosi in the 1931 Todd Browning landmark “Dracula.” The Universal horror film classics of the 1930s remain a rite-of-passage for kids everywhere.
Like many films aimed at children, “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania” has a lesson, too. It is “not to see the worst in things, but to see the good.” I take it this effort is Exhibit A.
(“Hotel Transylvania: Transformania” contains perilous action, rude humor and something called “cartoon nudity.”)