Film: Monster House
Genre: Cartoon ghost story
The pitch: The night before Halloween, sleuthing middle-schoolers DJ (Mitchell Musso), Chowder (Sam Lerner) and Jenny (Spencer Locke) suspect that the spooky house across the street possesses supernatural powers and a ravenous appetite for trick-or-treaters.
Money shots: With eye-like windows, a door frame that snaps like jaws and a whip-like red carpet for tongue, the scene-stealing house gives a new meaning to the term "scenery chewing."
Body Count: The film features an unnervingly realistic heart attack early on. In flashback, a shrewish woman suffers a fatal accident. The house engulfs three doomed dimwits and a disrespectful dog — but all is not what it seems.
Voice cameos: The film features brief vocal work from Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara as the inevitably clueless parents, and more showy performances from Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder as a pimply expert in supernatural hokum and Steve Buscemi as the house's cranky owner with "Get off my lawn!" as his mantra.
Best line: Sending a jerry-rigged decoy toward the house to test its powers, Chowder tearfully declares, "I love you, vacuum-cleaner dummy. Don't be scared — that's not how we trained you!"
Fashion statement: Chowder wears a little red cape the size of a dish towel —you know, like all the kids do these days.
Cult lineage: Screenwriters Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab wrote the cult TV-series pilot Heat Vision and Jack, in which Jack Black and a talking motorcycle solved mysteries. You can YouTube it.
Techno-geek factor: Monster House uses the same motion-capture software as The Polar Express.
The bottom line: Though way too loud and intense for small kids, Monster House at least proves less nightmarish than The Polar Express' attempts at holiday cheer. It also feels like a deliberate throwback to the 1980s' shrill, silly suburban adventures like The Goonies, so take that either as an endorsement or a warning.
Monster House (PG) opens Friday at local theaters. 2 stars
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2006.