Cute, funny, and adorably cliche, Hotel Transylvania puts gory horror movies in their place. The movie is about Dracula (voiced by Adam Sandler) who builds a hotel for monsters that seek an escape from being misunderstood by humans and to keep his daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez), from leaving his side. When Mavis’ 118th birthday comes around, she tells her dad that she wants to go out and see the world, and so Dracula, being an extremely overprotective father, hires his zombie bellhops to dress up as an angry mob of humans and scare out Mavis’ trust in the world. But all of this changes when a human, Jonathan (Andy Samberg), finds the monster sanctuary. It’s up to Dracula to protect the safety of the hotel by dressing Jonathan up as Frankenstein’s cousin and keeping him from getting too comfortable with Mavis and his monster friends. One thing Drac doesn’t calculate in his plans: the “zing” of love.

I liked the movie’s incorporation and variety of different monsters and their personalities in this movie. We see witches, big foot, mummies, voodoo doll heads, Mr. and Mrs. Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, werewolves, and many others. I also enjoyed the animation. It wasn’t outstanding, but it was nice to look at and the details done on Mavis were particularly good as many scenes were done well because of the work the animators put to making her look cute through many different facial expressions and emotions.

One scene of the movie that I must say I loved in particular was when Jonathan is seen on a plane watching Twilight and Drac says, “This is how we’re represented. Unbelievable!” You know a vampire movie is better than Twilight when they know it. This movie definitely wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, which was somewhat disappointing as I had expected more humor from a movie starring Adam Sandler. Things that were funny in the beginning were overused later in the movie, which slowly killed off many good jokes. Speaking of overused, although it was a central part of the movie, something about the whole “vampire and human romance” threw me off. It’s a theme that is too overused and very cliche. I wish that the writers could have strayed away from the romantic concepts and moved more towards the whole idea of having this travel-loving, music savvy human come into this world of old-fashioned monsters and teach them more about humans today and why they shouldn’t fear them. The idea of the sparkle and zing of romance, and the whole “I don’t care that you’re human, I just want to be with you” idea was nice, but the Twilight-y theme could have been toned down just to avoid cliche overkill.

Something that bothered me about this movie was the incorporation of Quasimodo as the hotel’s monster chef. Quasimodo is a fictional character, known to be misjudged because of his deformity but is actually very kindhearted, and in this movie we see him portrayed as a human-hungry, angry and violent character. It seems almost wrong for the makers of the movie to show Quasi this way. He’s not a monster, he’s just misunderstood.

Overall, I’d say Hotel Transylvania is a decent movie. It is definitely a refreshing break from the usual horror movies around this time. If you’re not a big horror movie fan and still want to participate in the Halloween movie tradition, Hotel Transylvania is the way to go.