The third Hotel Transylvania animated feature sees Dracula and his extended family going on an ocean cruise. Little do they realise it but their arch-enemy professor Van Helsing is lurking in the bowels of the ship, getting ready to destroy all the monsters as soon as they reach the Lost Kingdom of Atlantis. Van Helsing’s co-conspirator is his great-grand-daughter Ericka, the ship’s captain. Dracula himself hasn’t been on a date for over 100 years but feels an immediate “zing” when he first sees Ericka,
As such a summary suggests, the film is sketchily plotted and very silly. It ends even more absurdly than it begins (the final section is given over to a battle of the DJs in which we are treated to everything from The Beach Boys to "Hey Macarena"). Some of the puns are truly feeble. (One of the worst refers to a character who has never been to Egypt but is still in “denial.”) When garlic is put on his salad, Dracula starts farting (something which never happened to Christopher Lee or Bela Lugosi when they were wearing the fangs.) We also see him sunbathing, playing a monster form of volleyball in the pool and dancing the tango. The Frankenstein monster gambles away his arms at the roulette tables and ends up with crab claws instead.
Director Genndy Tartakovsky’s imagination isn’t in question. The film is packed with ingenious visual gags and engagingly outlandish creatures. The voice work is distinctive too. Adam Sandler camps it up in best eastern European fashion as Dracula while Selena Gomez still sounds as full of teen spirit as ever as his young at heart 126-year-old daughter, Mavis. We also get to hear Mel Brooks’ trenchant tones as the ancient Vlad and the world-weary ones of Steve Buscemi as the whining werewolf, looking for childcare on board for his small army of puppies.
In its scattergun way, parts of the film are funny and very inventive. The hitch is that the storytelling feels so utterly random. All sorts of unrelated ideas are thrown together into the big, sloppy, monster mash of a plot as the cruise continues. The end message, namely that monsters and humans aren’t that different and really ought to learn to get along, is sanctimonious in the extreme. Maybe it is time to put a stake through the heart of this particular franchise.
