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Monster House Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG (for scary images and sequences, thematic elements, some crude humor and brief language) Genre: Animated Theater release: July 21, 2006 by Columbia Pictures Directed by: Gil Kenan Runtime: 1 hour 31 minutes Cast: Mitchel Musso (DJ), Sam Lerner (Chowder), Spencer Locke (Jenny), Steve Buscemi (Nebbercracker), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Zee), Jason Lee (Bones), Jon Heder (Skull), Kathleen Turner (Constance) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

It's beginning to look like Robert Zemeckis wants to make a motion-capture cartoon for every season, though his timing seems a little off. First, he directed The Polar Express, which came out in early November two years ago and, despite an initially lukewarm reception, picked up steam at the box office as Christmas itself came into view. Now, he is one of several producers (Steven Spielberg is another) behind Monster House, which takes place before and during Halloween—but the film is coming out in mid-July, more than three months before the "holiday" in question. There are precedents for releasing a film out of season, as it were (the first two Die Hard movies take place on Christmas Eve but came out in July), but this is still a little odd. What's next, a tribute to the Fourth of July on Groundhog Day?

Jenny (Spencer Locke), DJ (Mitchel Musso) and Chowder (Sam Lerner) are a bit concerned about the house across the street

Timing of another sort turns out to be a key issue for the main characters in Monster House, too. That is, the story concerns two boys who are in the early stages of puberty—voices cracking, and so on—and they wonder if they have already become too old to trick-or-treat. Will this be the first year that they are obliged to skip out on all the free candy, or is there still time for one last hurrah?

But first, they have to figure out what to do about that old, dilapidated house across the street. An old man named Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi) lives there, and he terrorizes every child who steps on his lawn, chasing them away and hoarding their kites and tricycles. But when DJ (Mitchel Musso) and his chubby friend Chowder (Sam Lerner) try to retrieve a stray basketball from Nebbercracker's lawn, the old man gets so worked up about it that he falls to the ground, apparently dead—an incident that we see in extreme close-up, from DJ's point of view, after the man grabs him and looks straight into his eyes, and thus straight into ours.

DJ, Jenny, and Chowder want to get a closer look

And then, no sooner has the ambulance taken the old man away than the house itself begins to act kind of strange. A fireplace self-ignites, cracks runs through its windows, and the lawn swallows objects that have been left lying in the grass. And that's before the house and the trees around it begin lashing out at people.

Convinced that Nebbercracker's spirit has possessed the house, DJ and Chowder spy on the building from DJ's bedroom and ponder what to do. They also zip across the street to rescue Jenny (Spencer Locke), a bright and entrepreneurial young girl who, while going door-to-door selling last-minute supplies of candy, innocently steps within range of the house and its clutches. Together, and with a bit of advice from the local video-game addict (Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder), the kids then set out to defeat the house before it can do any harm to that evening's trick-or-treaters.

With Halloween as its setting, the movie nicely captures that ambiguous point in life when children realize that growing up means losing something that is valuable to them. Most of the time, if children think about what they might lose by growing up, they look forward to losing the burdens of childhood—bossy parents, going to school, not being allowed to stay home on their own without a babysitter. Growing up means independence and freedom from all that. But whereas some customs, like Christmas presents, follow us into adulthood, the ritual of trick-or-treating is specific to childhood—and because it happens only once a year, and because the years seem so long when you're a child, it can be a bit startling for a child on the cusp of maturity to suddenly realize that he or she is no longer one of those kids.

Chowder, Jenny, and DJ, making their move

And speaking of age-appropriateness, Monster House may look like the sort of movie that is more or less safe for little kids, but the humour gets a little crude in places. Chowder becomes so obsessed with the possessed house that, when he sleeps over at DJ's place, he never leaves the bedroom to go to the bathroom—so he pees in a bottle instead, a fact that grosses out both Jenny and the babysitter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) when they discover the object. In a later scene, the children finally go inside the house, and they find that it is shaped like the inside of a mouth. Jenny points to an object hanging from the ceiling and says, "That must be the uvula," to which Chowder replies, "Oh, so it's a girl house." Jenny immediately corrects him, but you have to wonder how many kids will ask their parents to explain the joke—and how many parents would rather not have to field such questions.

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