Hotel Transylvania 2

Spoofy vamps and spooky monsters are the stuff of cartoon fantasy. What better for the imagination than a glut of horrors?

HT2 has a prob. The lesson of The Addams Family has not been learnt. It's not clever to create objects of extreme weirdiosity without stuffing their skull cavities with appropriate grey matter.

Also, the plot's a plonker.

Drac, the Transylvanian hotelier, lost his wife in an earlier incarnation to horrid humans so when Mavis, his tomboy daughter, gives birth to a baby boy he needs to know how the little one's fangs are coming along.

Rewind: Mavis marries a goofy carrot top (homosappy from California), called Jonny, at the start of the movie.

Fast forward: baby's birthdays, one, two, three, yawn. No blood sucking molars yet. Granvamp is nervous. Has his DNA been wiped by Jonny's folks? Will the kid never feel the wind in his fur, or taste the sweet wet warmth of a jugular half pint?

The story resembles the long night of a babysit. Nothing about the hotel. A bit about the in-laws preparing for a visitation. A lot about how times have changed and a young person's experience of growing up has been cushioned by Health & Safety, diminishing fear from a vampire's arsenal. Now Drac is mocked and laughed at in the street. Whatever next? Ghost parties at the graveyard? Blood tastings in the dungeon?

What's missing is character. A one-gag concept lasts as long as a werewolf's belch. Where's the encore? Monsters lurch, bats flap, humans stay within their stereotypes, As for Junior's pearly whites, suck on them.