Were The Hotel Transylvania Movies Any Good?

the 2010s was the very mixed decade for animated movies most of the major studios had fully committed to using cgi for their films pretty much killing mainstream 2d animated features with only a few exceptions like winnie the pooh or whatever and with cgi turning out to be much more cost effective compared to traditional hand-drawn animations it allowed more studios to come into the ring and try their hand at rivaling the likes of disney or dreamworks one of those studios was sony pictures animation now they got their start all the way back in 2006 with their first major release open season which was a moderate success and showed the world that they were capable of making relatively popular movies i said popular didn't say good over the next few years they continued to have minor success with films such as surfs up but still nothing managed to even somewhat compete with the likes of disney and pixar this all started his shift however in the year 2009 with the release of one of the most popular films date colliding with a chance of meatballs this was just a simple fun movie about a guy building an invention that creates food that falls from the sky while trying to gain the approval of his town and father and while not the biggest financial hit out there this film was one of the first times where i'd argue sony broke out into the mainstream everybody i knew at the time watched and loved this movie we'd quote lines from it and marvel at the amazingly creative animation which was unlike anything really that was being produced by the other studios at the time and well okay we we don't talk about the sequel but point being i think claudia with a chance of meatballs was a sign of things to come then maybe sony couldn't exactly make stuff on the same caliber of disney or dreamworks but instead they could do their own thing and make sure they do a good job at standing apart from the competition and with the start of a new deck he had sony really struck gold with the release of the 2012 film hotel transylvania a movie which features dracula building a hotel for monsters to stay in so they can be protected from humans and the decades since its initial release we've continued to get three sequel movies a television series a bunch of video games and merchandise it's safe to say this thing was a hit now i really enjoyed the first one that came out i was a big fan despite this though i never returned to watch any of the sequels they simply never interested me but even then they continued to commit i mean big hits with an overall collected box office of 1.3 billion dollars maybe i should have kept up with it perhaps i was missing some quality entertainment so if the recent release of the fourth and perhaps final film of the series i figured that this would be the perfect time to check out the entire franchise and see what i missed out on if not to enjoy it then to at least find out how the franchise managed to last this long so here it is the hotel transylvania retrospective but first i get a lot of questions about my name why ls mark what does the l stand for it has long been believed that it stood for many things such as love sonic or that it represents all the ales i take for my bad opinions but that's just preposterous my opinions are fact as we all know well let it be known that on this dead the l has a new meaning it officially stands for lord because i just got this plot of land in scotland from today's sponsor established times this video is sponsored by established titles established titles is based on a scottish tradition of landowners being referred to as lyrids or lords and ladies in english established titles is a company that aims to preserve the picturesque woodlands and biodiversity of scotland by allowing you to purchase as little as one square foot of land in scotland and in return you can now officially call yourself a lord or lady and with every order they even plant a tree working with charities such as one tree planted in trees for the future you can also use the plot number to look at the exact location on a map it makes for the perfect last minute valentine's gift as you can even get a couples pack where you can get an adjoining piece of land if not you can always just get it for yourself and force everyone to call you a lord or lady this means you can even get it on a ton of stuff such as your credit card or plane tickets established titles is currently having a massive valentine's day seal just for you guys and on top of that seal you can get an additional 10 off any purchase you make with discount code lsmark so click the link below or go to establishtitles.com lsmark and use promo code alicemark to save an extra 10 today and thanks to established titles for sponsoring this video all right now for all that out of the way let's finally get into it the original hotel transylvania now i haven't seen this thing all the way through since it came out back in 2012. i loved it but is it possible that a ten-year-old didn't have the best opinions on an animated movie it's hard to believe but let's just be cautious either way so without further ado here it is after sitting through this film for the first time in a decade my mean takeaway was wow i forgot how basic this thing was that's not automatically a negative i'd rather a movie be simple and convoluted but i really did forget how straightforward and short it is hotel transylvania stars dracula pled by the man the myth the guy who can only do one voice for everything and even that isn't very good at that adam sandler like previously mentioned he's built this hotel for the purpose of being able to protect all the monsters who regularly have to live in the shadows why he doesn't just let them stay there all the time i don't know they don't really go into the monster economy and stuff but but you know more specifically he's using it as a way to protect his daughter mavis who's the only thing he has left after the death of his wife who did that literally just take adam sandler's actual wife and draw her as a vampire cool right anyways with his daughter turning 118 and wanting to see more of the world dracula's doing anything he can to try and prevent her from leaving even if it means lying however this all takes a turn when a human called johnny finds the way into the hotel and immediately hits it off with me this and so no i don't i mean dracula that's gonna take a while to use too has to do all he can to prevent her from leaving again simple there isn't even really a villain to speak of unless you want to count this chef guy but i don't because he isn't really in it that much i like that drac almost works as both the protagonist and antagonist i think he's the best part of the film despite consistently making shitty decisions and lying to people they do a good job of making you understand why he's like that and what the reason is behind his motives stops him from becoming an unlikable character all the characters are pretty likable actually i don't think there's a bad one in the bunch i feel like as a result of them focusing on drax so much causes mieves to be a tad underdeveloped we aren't really given much of a reason for her wanting to leave other than just her wanting to leave you know but you know it works it's not unheard of for someone to just want to go and do something for a while i just wish that maybe she were a little more fleshed out give us a scene of her and only her or show us from her perspective what it's like living at the hotel show us how routine her life is and therefore why she'd want to explore you know i like jonathan too more than i thought i would when they introduced him it all came back i remember knowing why i didn't watch any of the sequels [Music] but that's for later again at first i was worried he's designed to be that annoying fish out of water who comes in like a wrecking ball to mess up our main character's plan so they can very easily come off as annoying to the audience too but thankfully i was pleasantly surprised here they managed to reel in his character just enough so that he isn't too overbearing i think that mostly comes down to the fact that johnny very quickly becomes aware of the setting he's in you know he's not oblivious to the fact that he's in a place filled with a bunch of dangerous monsters he's not presented as a dumb guy he's more of a slackery shaggy type and because of that they very swiftly dodge that bullet of me grinding my teeth every time he appears on screen if i were to have one small complaint though it's that i feel like him and drac become friends too quickly like he goes from being at his angriest with him to having a fun time in the span of minutes could have definitely done more than rather than him just riding a table and suddenly everything being fine with that the only other issue i really have with the plot is that none of the secondary characters have anything to do we have frankenstein the mummy invisible man and werewolf they all have names i do not bother remembering them but they don't add anything up until the very teal end of the film their only purpose is to annoy drak when he sees that johnny's getting along well with them but hey how could you have adam sandler as your lead without his band of snl friends joining him it's a package deal yep kevin james steve buscemi david speed they're all here voicing different monsters and while this mess unlike a turn off they all end up doing pretty good performances better than selena gomez at least jesus she just reminds me of miley cyrus and bolt she's not a very good voice actor one of the highlights and what's definitely worth praising about this movie though was the animation before spider-verse and mitchells versus the machines sony pictures animation didn't exactly have the best track record with such blunders as the smurfs emoji movie but when they try on a film they really [ __ ] try and i think that's incredibly important with the animation of this film claudia with a chance of meatballs blew me away when i saw it the visuals of that movie especially for the time is phenomenal instead of doing what the competition was doing and trying to make an animated feature that shot for trying to be as realistic as possible it instead took the opposite approach and tried to stretch its 3d models as much as they could to try and replicate a lot of the techniques used within traditional 2d animation with the most obvious thing being how much these characters can squash stretch and band they can pull more than 6 basic emotions and are incredibly versatile hotel transylvania thankfully further around with this approach and i think a huge thanks to that keem from the film's director gandhi tartakovsky who was previously known for creating such shows as dexter's lab and samurai jack watching this movie after a couple episodes of dexter's lab really shows you how much he had his hands in this project the storyboarding and especially the posing is just so [ __ ] strong with him oftentimes redrawing poses and storyboards to make them as expressive as possible that was something very important to fotel transylvania watching it not at messi matad primitive are not perched enough but that's only because we're seeing more and more studios push 3d animation to its limits but you have films like this to thank for that it's a real joy to look at i especially love the scenes that are still storyboarded like flat 2d cartoons and we see the characters either fully front facing or with a profile shot the camera trickery done here is astonishing so there we have it i was initially worried i wasn't gonna like this movie anymore but not at all for what it is it's a decent little film about the relationship between a father and daughter now we can just move [Music] that's why i didn't continue watching these movies i vividly remember being 10 years old and seeing this on the big screen and proceeding to recoil into my chair out of secondhand embarrassment vowing to never watch another one of these films ever again look if a 10 year old thinks you're cringe then that's not a good sign see there's something i forgot to mention this film is a comedy is it a good one it's very hit or miss sometimes it can catch you off guard me pretty funny who is that are these monsters gonna kill me not as long as they think you're a monster huh that's kind of racist but when it misses it really misses and i just kind of shiver out of embarrassment despite being all alone i don't know i get that shrek made it somewhat mandate that every animated movie ever needed to end on a dance party ending and i'll accept that but you let adam sandler rap and that's where i draw the line even still everything considered hotel transylvania is a solid little movie it sets its goal pretty low like like really though we basically have a phone that takes place in one location but it manages to achieve being a fun silly movie with a lot of heart mostly coming from the relationship between meevus and drak starting off relatively strong here aren't we but we've still got three films left so it's too soon to make any judgments although i do wonder where they're going to go from here everyone major had a pretty complete dart boy i sure hope this isn't a pointless on a necessary sequel that retreads everything done in the first you called it it's a pointless and unnecessary sequel that retreads everything done in the first let's get started shall we hotel transylvania 2 released a whole three years after the first in 2015 although it did lose one of its original riders well maybe he wasn't important who do you get replaced by yep okay hotel transylvania is not a good movie it's not even an alright movie it's bad apparently this series has a huge online fan base but that's something i've never really looked into so i have no idea how these movies rank in the eyes of the hardcore fans but from my own experience this film sucks to start in the first 15 or so minutes the pacing is so goddamn fast they're desperately trying to cover so much ground in such a short time span that i honestly would have preferred if we just started off with a time skip what did we really learn from all this they get married have a kid and drac wishes that he would be a vampire like there we go why couldn't we just start it like that oh yeah that's right because then we wouldn't have gotten to see all the uncomfortable shots of me this being pregnant i bet some people really liked that like literally within this entire opening i want to say like six years pass mavis and johnny are now like 24 and 27 respectively yet she still looks like an 18 year old and johnny well johnny always looked 15. so much like the first one hotel transylvania 2 follows an incredibly basic plot mavis and johnny are married and had their first kid but nobody knows if he's going to be a human or a vampire and so drake tries to distract mavis by having johnny take her to california as he and his band of monster snl perhaps joined by blobby for some reason he doesn't add anything try to teach the kid how to be a vampire my main takeaway from the story was dude they're [ __ ] jonathan you are banging my dog my main takeaway from this is that they had no clue on what to actually do with a sequel here let's start with mevis and johnny they do nothing here mevis just acts protective of her son and wants to move to california to give him a better life and so her and johnny go there for about two scenes it's so unbelievably short and clearly only done to get them out of the picture for a while for silly dracula nonsense but not even that feels right one of my biggest priests for the first movie is that despite him [ __ ] up a lot and doing shitty things you still understand why drak is doing what he's doing and still remains to be a likable protagonist however all they do in this one is have drax say things that would make you sympathize for him but then never actually follow up on any of it through his actions such as how he keeps saying that he'll accept his grandson whether he be a human or vampire but through his actions does nothing but show how desperate he is for him to be like his family but like just just take a [ __ ] picture of him that would solve everything the film goes out of its way like twice in the beginning to show us that maeve and drak don't appear in photos so just do the scene with a kid i don't understand but then this is all completely abandoned in the last 30 minutes when we're introduced to a brand new character drex dad vlad well that's a mouthful he's the film's antagonist we don't see him until there's like [ __ ] 25 minutes left he comes in after mevis returns from california for their kid's birthday no oh no they have to stop him from ruining everything because he hits humans if this sounds like it comes completely out of left field it's because it does before this point we had only like one or two mentions of the guy but now he's supposed to be the main antagonist we no he's not even the main antagonist he turns around and regrets his decision in the span of a couple minutes and either me and a mian antagonist is this giant bat guy who was like his henchmen that got like a second his screen time previously and now we have a big fight scene with a bunch of them in this [ __ ] wacky action scene and this [ __ ] movie goes completely off the reels in the last third it falls apart it really just feels like they had no idea what to do with this story like they had a decent idea of where to go but not actually how to flesh it out if you want my opinion oh you don't i'm giving it anyways i think this should have had it all focused on drax's dad with him being disappointed in his son for allowing a human to get with his daughter and therefore come in between his legacy we don't see drak worry that mievis is going to leave him forever because that was literally the conflict of the first one we don't need it again and we've already seen him come around on johnny being a human we don't need that ark again just with his grandson this time and there's still nothing for these [ __ ] side characters to do i seriously don't know why their plaster all over the posters when they never do anything now you may be asking yourself geez mark is there anything you liked about this film and the answer is no not really one thing that is better is the animation the expressions are perched a lot more along with the posing and such which is impressive since the first movie already did a great job at that and it is cool that we finally got to see more of this world we're not simply restricted to the hotel but i don't know now we come to the problem that a lot of the characters from the first movie stand out way too much when paired with locations and characters designed for the second especially with the more humanoid characters and sets such as the camp track just stands out way too much here i think it'd be funnier if it were that way because of the whole fish out of water aspect he literally looks like he doesn't belong on earth but no that was not intentional at all you know what it reminds me of like a lot of those promotional crossovers for these kids movies that do where we have like [ __ ] minions or [ __ ] running around some guy's house showing him how to use the broadband internet but that definitely wasn't intentional because [ __ ] johnny's the most expressive character here and he's a human so i really don't know what happened well maybe they took time away from designs to focus on the writing and humor like how did that improve what's that thing on your head looks like my grandmother's boobies oh it didn't i didn't think it was physically possible but the humor in hotel transylvania 2 managed to be 10 times worse than the original like it was a bad sign when the brick dancing started only 15 minutes in come on at least that first movie had the decency to leave that [ __ ] till the end and now we all know how much they love their wacky relatable jokes right now we get hilarious jokes about the monsters going on facebook it was somebody's job to sit and model a 3d sony phone i hope the sony executives bought their family a nice casket shut up shut up and you bet your bottom dollar we end this [ __ ] in another epic dance party ending although at least they had the foresight to not give adam silently the microphone and there we have it hotel transylvania 2. it sucks i have never in my life seen a more unnecessary pointless sequel make its way to the big screen it's evident that whoever worked on this had no idea how to take the franchise in a new direction and so just made what is basically the first movie again but with a baby how this movie made 500 million dollars at the box office is beyond me but it did so you know what that means hotel transylvania 3 baby i mean hey it can't be that much worse than this one can it oh cool it um wasn't anywhere near as bad some might even call it decent or all right or are good oh well that's not going to get ahead of ourselves here but it earns it's all right reading in my books but how is that even possible the second movie was struggling for a place to go with these characters what could the third possibly do different well that simply just takes the characters and plops them in a new setting for the entire run time in hotel transylvania 3 we see our lovable protagonists take a relaxing vacation on a cruise from their bermuda triangle all the way to the no longer lost city of atlantis first of all i want to say this movie has a way more interesting opening than the previous actually setting up the me and villain ahead of time being this guy van helsing who wants to kill all monsters because of family legacy in the sorts but wait a minute the ship's captain looks awfully familiar to him i wonder if that's gonna oh okay good they revealed that it's his granddaughter very quickly i appreciate them not deciding to waste our time on some twist villain [ __ ] now the main focus here is still on drak with him trying to get back into the dealing scene while keeping it from meevus as he's worried about how she'll react this predictably leads into drac falling in love with the ship captain who's secretly trying to kill him but oh no she starts to fall in love with him and wants to go against her grandfather's wishes and they all danced to dubstep the end wait what oh yeah this was 2017. i forgot this was the dubstep era remember when deadpool 2 made like 15 dubstep jokes like two years after everyone had already moved on from it i love dubstep so anyways i actually don't mind the setup at all not only does it give us a brand new setting for our characters to explore and make jokes out of but it also gets to the point faster we don't need a 20-minute setup i just want to see them on the funny boat this film in general is just a lot more creative than the last shows us how this world works a lot more and how there are places for monsters to go that isn't just the hotel i like the gremlin airways thing the atlanta set was a lot of fun too was surprised to see that they treated the exact same way they're doing that new shitty spongebob movie with it being this vegas knockoff if i were to have any complaint it's that i feel the story wears out it's welcome and starts to drag near the end this is the longest one so far by only about 15 minutes or so but still it's the longest and i don't really think that extra time was necessary arrived when the captain lady was falling for drac i was starting to lose interest like just because i think this one is better than the last doesn't make it good by any means it's got its own fair share of issues for one they still don't have a lot for the side characters to do not even mavis or johnny have much presence here i still don't even really get why mivis was so mad about drac getting with someone it's like they're simply just role reversed to the first movie is she mad because this lady's design is [ __ ] hideous seriously what's with that chin that thing could cut glass genuinely wouldn't be surprised if this were just a repurposed model from the cancelled sony popeye movie and this one definitely has it the worst in terms of that zing [ __ ] if you don't know what that means i'm gonna assume you've never watched any of these movies before and i don't blame you i've refrained from mentioning it till now because i couldn't even say it without getting second-hand embarrassment but they mentioned it so [ __ ] much in this one that i just got it zing is something from the first movie basically it's a monster's love at first sight it's why mivis likes johnny so much it's also what adam sandler raps about at the end of that one i don't know i get it's a kids movie but it's just such a boring way of going we have to be together the plot demands it she doesn't like me no that's not possible we zinged that's the quality of the dialogue in this movie i guess i like that the sequel builds upon an element of the first one but you're building upon something that i already find lame especially since the captain lady only starts to like him after the second he mentions that his wife died why is that a turn on ladies anyone want to answer me no good to get back to positives this one is definitely the best so far in terms of animation they really are pushing these character poses and expressions beyond what i thought was even capable i like drax's dumbass charlie brown smile and once again in terms of sets it's most definitely where the animation shines i especially like the scene of them scuba diving where they can't speak so the character's intentions and actions have to purely be conveyed visually does a great job at displaying why this type of animation works so well although if there is one bit of animation that really got to me it has to be this moment with this dumbass monster bb looking thing where there is no frames whatsoever in between standing still and [ __ ] rocking off at sonic speed i know a lot of people find this to be the best one in the franchise for reasons other than meevus being shown in a bathing suit surprisingly and i can definitely see why you may think that it feels a lot more like a movie compared to the second and is a lot wackier compared to the first but for me i see it as just kind of middle of the road the first still edges out personally because i feel like it did a better job at exploring the main characters and giving me a reason to like them still though we've had three movies not exploring drak and mavis and [ __ ] you have like 10 other secondary characters who have almost no plot importance in any of these movies and you're introducing more now with vlad being a mean state character in this one and them even having this brand new giant dog who is clearly only added for marketing reasons you know that's the problem with being limited to movies you have to make sure that each of them is big enough in scope to warrant the runtime and make people interested and with such a large cast of widely different characters i actually think the series would benefit a lot from being turned into a tv show so it was turned into a tv show i feel like before we head into the fourth and final film in the franchise it would be cool to take a minor detour into the hotel transylvania cartoon that was on disney channel back in 2017 around the same time as this movie actually i never knew of anyone who bothered to watch it this is my first time too i also don't think it did very well in terms of ratings only ran for like 50 episodes so i'm curious to see what everyone was missing not much apparently so this show takes place before any of the movies with dracula going away on vacation and leaving his sister in charge of the hotel with me this so all i have to say this was incredibly mindless and boring dracula does appear a couple times though what are you doing in my room that uh that's not adam sandler is it he somehow doesn't even worse dracula voice for what it is the raked animation was kind of decent i'll give it that i don't know i feel like i'm one of the few people who prefers rigged animation over frame by frame for new animated shows it's easier to avoid that very stiff and lifeless feeling a lot of the newer ones come off as like oil heist or amphibia whoops i shouldn't have said that anyways it's only really good on mivis though she was clearly the character they put all their effort into like frankenstein the mummy and blobby were kind of shitty looking oh yeah that's right okay so in this show they're all younger and different characters because i guess they didn't want to have mevis pal ryan with her dad's friends the whole show and or paul blart didn't want to reprise his role like i said it just feels mindless like its only motive is to keep the attention of a little baby oh no yep you've got the nose picker from that human trap across the way honey have you seen the baby a nose picker like everything is moving where too fast that wasn't even a joke so why include it i don't know maybe i'm being too harsh with a big production like this it becomes very easy for certain intentions to go unseen or lost in translation i have nothing more to say on this thing this was a complete waste of time i apologize [Music] nah i just sent him a gift from what i understand this movie had a really rocky development history originally supposed to come out in theaters until that day kept getting deland delayed i can only imagine they thought this whole pandemic thing was going to end soon but they eventually caved in and decided to release it straight to streaming on amazon prime so yeah this thing isn't making its money back i assume a bunch of other stuff was going on behind the scenes too dandy tartakovsky wasn't returning to direct and surprisingly neither was adam sandler kind of an issue when you have to replace your main character and i'm sad to say his replacement wasn't very good i am extremely proud and honored to give the key to the hotel too he's not even attempting a dracula voice he's just doing a shitty adam sandler impression so let's get on with the party i ate adam sandler are you who i'm in here with the pizza despite acknowledging stuff from the sequels such as their kid and the captain love interest lady the plot of this movie desperately wants you to not remember the events of the second and third the story follows dracula who's about to announce his retirement leaving the hotel to mives and johnny but after remembering that johnny is incompetent he decides to lie to him and said that he can't have it because he's not a monster so with the help of van helsing johnny gets turned into a monster with drak and his friends accidentally being turned into humans right off the bat they really want to drive home the fact that drac eats johnny but like that was only something from the first movie and the other two drac didn't really seem to have any sort of issue with him other than the occasional moment of annoyance but here he [ __ ] despises the guy and remember how i appraised the fact that in the first movie johnny remained a likable character due to them not making him an oblivious idiot well now he's an oblivious idiot he just runs around screaming all the [ __ ] time he doesn't listen to a thing anybody tells me he's so [ __ ] annoying the entire gimmick is that it's a solo drak and johnny adventure but each and every scene they have is the same up johnny is having fun and being oblivious to the danger around him while drack gets injured in some way that's not funny it's sad because i don't think drak deserves any of the [ __ ] that's happening to him sure he lied but i wouldn't want this [ __ ] bozo running my hotel either he hasn't proven that he's capable of anything and even worse he comes around on johnny in the exact same way that it happened in the first film they fly around for a bit and have a fun time and suddenly he appreciates the fact that sometimes he needs to let loose and not worry so much how do you not [ __ ] realize you're doing the same thing i don't get it i wrote a whole bunch of notes nitpicking every little thing about this movie but why bother all i need to say is this tyler ninja blevins has a two second cameo that amounts to nothing that's where the filmmaker's heads were at lastly i can't even give this one a plus for the animation sometimes it looks good yeah but at other points it's incredibly stiff which is really noticeable on characters like drac who are usually very animated maybe covert had something to do with that i don't know and in other cases i'd argue it's wet too animated if that were possible this is mostly an issue with johnny though the rest of the characters are fine but he's just a [ __ ] [ __ ] i don't know what else to say this movie sucks the invisible man wasn't hot two out of ten and there we have it kinda went out on a low note but that's the entire hotel transylvania franchise borrow a few shorts that i don't care enough to look at but i'm sure they're fine i gotta say these series of films are not what i expected them to be that being that they were a lot worse than i thought they were not even the first one was as good as i remember and most i say it's an all right to good family film but is ultimately forgettable much like the sequels if i were to give these any kind of ranking as i'm known to do from best horse did go one three two and four but even then at its highest points i don't care for these all that much what a shame but hey at least it's over and done with naught the fourth was confirmed to be the last which means once again we as a society received from the clutches of adam sandler [Applause] [Applause] you

Channel: LS Mark

Views: 978,865

Keywords: LS Mark, Hotel Transylvania, Hotel Transylvania Review, Adam Sandler, Adam Sandler Dracula, Dracula, Mavis, Haha Johnathon, Hotel Transylvania 2, Hotel Transylvania 2 Review, Hotel Transylvania 3, Hotel Transylvania 3 Review, Hotel Transylvania 4, Hotel Transylvania 4 Review, Transformania, LS Mark Review, Were The Hotel Transylvania Movies Any Good, Hotel Transylvania Retrospective, Hotel Transylvania The Series, Hotel Transylvania TV Show

Id: 58q1UCwHh-4

Length: 29min 15sec (1755 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 13 2022