Monster High Frights Camera Action!

In this latest release from Universal in their Monster High franchise Draculaura finds herself the selected as the new vampire queen. Upon returning to Transylvania she finds that not everything is as she thought it would be and there might be something else afoot concerning her custodian Lord Stoker, the vampire who has sat in the seat of power until he finds the queen. 

 

All in all I rather enjoyed this story. It’s a bit of a treasure hunt, thriller, and comedy all rolled into one relatively short story at just 74 minutes total. Everything comes together rather well and will keep kids and even adults guessing as to the small details. It won’t take long for the parents to uncover them mystery, but then again this isn’t a movie for them. 

 

PICTURE QUALITY:

I was pretty disappointed with this BD transfer. You’d think an all animated feature that uses quite a bit of CGI would find no room for error but the transfer is very sloppy with blurred edges that go in and out of focus, especially during highly erratic scenes where characters are moving fast. Color is decent but sometimes becomes awash amongst the blur. 

 

Line detail is mostly poor. If you look at the character details like hair and texture it’s pretty soft and unimpressive. Despite the story being pretty great the feature would be just as good on DVD as it is on BD. Kind of makes it a bit redundant that the set comes with both. 

 

BONUS FEATURES:

~The only bonus feature that the set comes with, aside from a BD/DVD/Digital version, are three shorts, one that will especially make you raise an eyebrow. 

 

The first short is titled Crime Scream Investigation in which one of the ghouls finds a rose in her locker. Her jealous boyfriend becomes angry and storms off, eventually turning on his best friend. Everything is revealed by the end of the short but the final message is that the ghoul whose boyfriend became violent is happy to see not one, not two, but three boys fight over her before it fades out. What kind of message is that for kids?

 

The second short is titled Games Ghouls Play in which two cat ghouls chase two rat students around the school causing chaos in their midst. Really kind of a cute little short. 

 

The last short made me realize that all three of these shorts appear not to be shorts at all, but clips snipped from long running episodes. Interesting. 

 

In this final er, short, Monster-morphesus we find one of the ghouls going through sporadic mood changes. By the end of the short I pulled at my collar wondering if we were about to witness a PSA about menstruation but before anything of interest can happen the short abruptly ends. What? 

 

While Games Ghouls Play was a good snippet with an opening and an end I think Universal botched the other two shorts by leaving them vague, even unfinished. That’s your bonus feature? Calling a couple of clips a short. I didn’t much like how the making of this BD was handled all around.