Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (2022) - Movie Review

After the third film managed to bring everything full circle, I was quite certain that that would be the end of the Hotel Transylvania movies. And I don’t say that out of some sense of relief or anything like that; I’ve been a fan of this series since the first film, and beyond their fantastic and consistent animation style, I think they do well with their re-examination of the old-school Universal monsters and what it means to be Othered. As such, when this for-realsies finale snuck its way onto Amazon Prime all the way back in January of this year, I was a bit taken aback but willing to give it an honest shot. And what I got was… well, it’s still fun, but for the supposed finale, it’s also unequivocally the most lightweight of all these films.

The Invisible Man (2020) - Movie Review

The Universal Monsters. A stable of cinematic creatures that served as the progenitor for the modern craze surrounding cinematic universes, which itself has found repeated non-success in the post-MCU landscape. Dracula Untold was retrofitted to be part of the ‘Dark Universe’, and the results are unsurprisingly rushed, and the less said about the Tom Cruise vanity project (well, more so than any of his others, at least) The Mummy from 2017, the better. Hell, even before then with the works of Stephen Sommers in the 2000’s, attempts to bring back the classic monsters kept shooting themselves in the foot as far as trying to create serialised franchises out of them.

But now that Universal has stopped putting the cart before the horse, and are letting individual films stand on their own for a change, we have the latest attempt to bring back the old guard. And holy shit, this is easily the best attempt yet.