Monster House opens on July 21st, but I was lucky enough to see a pre-screening of the movie on Monday. Here is a trailer for the movie just in case you haven’t heard about this movie:

Just for clarification, this trailer shows the house eating the police car with the police in it. That didn’t happen in the movie.

I’m going to be honest. The animation was unpleasant. They loved to play with the “camera effects” like the opening scene of the movie in which they followed the fall of a leaf from a tree. It made me a little motion sick and felt gratuitious. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Pixar because the characters looked like poorly animated dolls to me. Gravity didn’t seem to work correctly in the Monster House world.

That said, the writing was excellent. There were many times that I laughed out loud at the dialogue. There were plenty of jokes that didn’t make it into the trailer. I liked the character development. The babysitter was exactly how I remember my babysitters being when I was a kid. I loved the scene where his parents leave him alone at the house. The kids are at that strange age between childhood and adulthood. I remember it well and they keep it pretty realistic.

This movie might be a little too scary for children under 13. At one point, the three heroes have snuck in the house undetected and are investigating with flashlights strapped onto water guns. It reminded me of a scary video game that I played. That was pretty intense. The movie takes a particularly dark turn in the explanation of the origin of the Monster House and the kids find a gruesome discovery in the basement. At that point, it was a little too “Silence of the Lambs” for me. Sure, the “eaten” people and dogs show up during the credits of the movie, making everything right in the world, but until that point, we were left with at least three unsolved murders on our hands.

Would I go to see this movie opening week? No. I’d probably go see Over The Hedge again. The animation in that movie doesn’t make me motion sick.

Would I go to see this movie in the dollar theater? Yeah, it’s worth paying a couple of dollars to see the scratched film version.

Would I buy this movie when it’s released on DVD? No. It’s definitely not worth cluttering up my collection. There are so many good Halloween movies to watch instead that this one would just get lost in the pile.

Would I return this movie if I received it as a present? No. It’s good enough to watch a couple of times and definitely good enough to keep instead of bothering with the return process at a store.

If you have seen all the other new releases on July 21st and have an afternoon to spare, I would recommend Monster House just for the witty dialogue, but don’t expect anything beautiful to come out of the screen. You could probably watch Monster House with a blindfold and get 90% of the enjoyment from it.