Monster House

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Every neighborhood had one. In mine, it was an old German woman who wore long peasant dresses and rushed onto her front porch with a broom she'd wave at kids the minute they tried to retrieve an errant ball or Frisbee. Then she'd walk onto her own forbidden grass, grab it, and retreat into mysterious solitude. Though she was the scary thing, not her house, we also had a ramshackle building on the same block that was cloaked in even more mystery—the kind of property that spawned dares, double-dares, and triple-dog-dares. And that's not even counting a local funeral home that became just as freaky for us at night.

Maybe that's why "Monster House," despite having a simple plot and mostly meat-and-potatoes writing, connects on a basic, universal level . . . the level of childhood FEAR. Add a basement (which you also get in this film, presented by Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg) and you've got every kid's triple whammy. But make no mistake about it, "Monster House" is not aimed at kids—at least not young ones. Director Gil Kenan uses animation to tell a frightful story that simply couldn't be told using live action. More than cartoons, the characters feel like caricatures of real humans, each with an exaggerated feature that's also tied to a central personality trait. The biggest exaggeration, of course, is the house itself, which in this film becomes a living, breathing, terrorizing entity.

Using motion or "performance" capture, with hundreds of dot-sensors taped to each actor and the actors asked to use their imaginations to perform on a sparse 20'x20' mo-cap stage, the filmmakers have crafted an animated feature that's just as scary, in spots, as some of the best horror films and thrillers. When you have a great concept, it's easy to get name actors to sign up. It's also easy to get your first directing gig. On one of the bonus features, we learn that Kenan, just three years out of film school, was entrusted with this big-budget project because he had a clear vision of how he wanted it to turn out, and he showed the studio brass pictures. They must have been some pictures, because he not only got the gig, he also got every actor on his first-choice wish list to come onboard—including Kathleen Turner, as the house (and Constance, a sideshow fat lady). Kevin James and Nick Cannon team as a couple of officers who sort-of investigate, Jason Lee and Jon Heder play a heavy-metal twosome, Bones and Skull, while Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Zee, the self-absorbed babysitter who's dating Bones. Steve Buscemi does the honors as the cranky neighborhood caretaker of Monster House, Mr. Nebbercracker, while Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara play the main kid's parents. But the bulk of this film belongs to young actors Mitchel Musso, Sam Lerner, and Spencer Locke, who play D.J., his chubby friend Chowder, and a Girl Scout named Jenny who's awfully street-savvy.

Without giving away too much of the plot, Monster House has a lawn that seems to be alive. Anything that goes onto it gets swallowed by the earth or picked up and taken into the house by Nebbercracker, who's been seen talking to the house as if it was real. Of course, only D.J. across the street seems to be aware of all this, and he monitors the action like a cop on stake-out, using a telescope from his bedroom. At first no one believes D.J., but when he and Chowder keep Jenny from being swallowed up by the house, they realize that they've got to do something to stop kids from trick-or-treating there on Halloween, which is just days away. The cops won't do anything, so it's up to them. And the rest of the film follows this crew's attempts to get at the secret of the house and learn how to stop it.

The motion-capture CGI technology is really wonderful to behold. You wouldn't think that something that looks so weird and technologically cold could warm up the CGI characters the way that this technique does, but it works. There's also the occasional zinger of a line, usually an understated one, that nicely complements the artwork and animation. A video game nerd they consult, like Yoda, says, dryly, "In my travels to video game and comic book conventions I've seen wondrous things." And when the kids find all sorts of scary things in the subterranean level of Monster House, Chowder quips, "We have a ping-pong table in our basement."

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