Wednesday, September 02, 2015

House of Monsters – review

Director: Dawn Brown

Release date: 2012 & 2015

Contains spoilers

House of Monsters started life as a one-off stop motion short (embedded below). This concentrated on the Mummy but did feature a vampire. The animation was dialogue free but had a charm and won several festival awards.

Cut forward to 2015 and a series (currently at two episodes length) has been created by Dawn Brown. It is now narrated, by Christopher Lloyd, and is available at YouTube. A lot of the character design had changed (most noticeably for Frankenstein’s Monster). The second episode is called Frank and the Zombie Girl and features the Monster, as well as carrying forward a relationship that first appeared in the episode before.

in the sun
Episode 1 is called Fun in the Sun and is vampire centric. Following an electrical glitch the digital alarm clock in the vampire’s coffin resets and the vampire is woken when it is still daytime. He rises and burns. Rushed into the Mad Doctor’s lab the Doctor finds a cure for vampire sunburn. This involves swaddling the vampire in bandages and actually gives the vampire immunity to sunlight.

bandaged vampire
That is all well and good, but the vampire takes advantage of his new daywalker status by terrorising the village (with practical joke level annoyances). The villagers actually think they are under attack from the Mummy, due to the vampire’s bandaged state. The story is simple but the animation, and Lloyd’s rhymed dialogue makes this a worthwhile viewing.

7.5 out of 10. The imdb page for the original short is here and the imdb page for the series is here.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for checking us out!

Taliesin_ttlg said...

No worries Dawn - can we expect more installments in the near future?

Unknown said...

Maybe not the NEAR future, but we definitely want to do more.

Taliesin_ttlg said...

I look forward to them :)

Unknown said...

Vimeo tells me the page is no longer there - what now?

Taliesin_ttlg said...

I suspect Vimeo was having a bad day as I just checked the link and it works fine :)

Unknown said...

Happy Halloween!!!!
We have parted ways with Vimeo.
All episodes are now on our YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/c/TheMonsterShopInc

Episode 1: Fun In the Sun

https://youtu.be/yIM9aD1YzXI

Episode 2: Frank and The Zombie Girl

https://youtu.be/HZKOlWQSirI

thanks

Taliesin_ttlg said...

Thanks for that Dawn - I assume therefore that the Vimeo Page still comes up for me due to me having purchased the shorts :)

I'll change the link in article.

BTW got to see these on the big screen this weekend at the Bram Stoker International Film Festival. They went down well :)

Unknown said...

Thank you, Dawn - I'm now subscribed and a big fan!

Cheers,
Dr D