Monster High: Why do Ghouls Fall in Love? – review

Director: Steve Sacks & Dustin McKenzie

Release date: 2011

Contains spoilers

Double billed with Friday Night Frights, this attempt to subvert the horror genre (distributed by Universal) no less, loses any vague credibility that the first film on the DVD might have scraped together and incinerates it on the funeral pyre of the monster mash.

Unfortunately, more so than the previous film and definitely more than Ghoul’s Rule, this is vampire orientated – concentrating as it does on Draculaura (Dee Dee Green).

Draculaura

An Elfman-esque opening piece of music drags us through the school and labyrinth basements of Monster High until we get to an underground chamber where the monsters are celebrating Draculaura’s sweet 16th (or, as it corrects, her 1600th). Now, forgive me, if she is 1600 years old (and, we discover, was in a vampire school 400 years previously) can we just wonder how terminally thick this vampire must be… 400 years+ and she’s still in school; evidently not a role model for the target audience.

tomato juice - bleurggh

The party seems to be a-bopping, she is given a car from her father (a sub plot is her trying to pass driver’s ed – see the observation on her educational sub-normalities in the previous paragraph). Perhaps it is because she is a vegan vampire (though she states vegetarian in film). When I say vegetarian I mean carrots. Other vampires spit out the drinks retrieved from the ‘blood fountain’ when it is discovered to be tomato juice.

empty wallet

Anyway, it’s all a fantasy… it’s the birthday she wants and the tough old thing for her werewolf boyfriend Clawd (Ogie Banks), is that her birthday is on Valentine’s Day… indeed Valentine’s Day was dedicated to her by a previous boyfriend called Valentine (Johnathan Lipow). Valentine was about to give her a "forever-after" all those centuries ago, when Draculaura’s parents fled with her – something to do with an angry peasant mob. How can a werewolf compete with that, especially a werewolf whose wallet is empty?

Valentine

This birthday Valentine shows up again. However he is an evil rotter, filling girls’ hearts with love and then breaking them gives him power and he intends to take and break Draculaura’s heart – even resorting to eye mojo. Clawd is distraught until an accident with Cupid’s bow make him and Cupid (Erin Fitzgerald) fall in love. Can the other girl monsters sort it out… Of course true love will out…

And that’s it, an entirely saccharine valentine story and another nail in the coffin of the monster mash as Mattel seek an extra buck. 2 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.