Monster Family 2 – review

Director: Holger Tappe

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

The film Happy Family, also known as Monster Family, has spawned this sequel four years later and brings the voice talent back to reprise their characters.

It is some time after the events of the first film but we start with a flight towards Dracula’s castle. Within there the Count (Jason Isaacs, Justice League: Gods and Monsters) is still frozen in manbat form. With the cry of “Wakey, wakey Dracula” from Mila Starr (Emily Carey), a new character, his tongue is touched by sunlight and the burning unfreezes him. We cut away and go to suburbia, where Max (Ethan Rouse) experiments with a magical stone he has 'borrowed' from Baba Yaga (Catherine Tate)

waking Drac

Cut back to Mila and there is a moment around a tooth cavity and capturing Dracula under a chandelier and then see her speaking, through hologram technology, to her parents – who send her to capture Baba Yaga. Meanwhile the family are meant to be going to aforementioned witch’s wedding to Renfield (Ewan Bailey, Vampyre Nation). After moments that show the stresses and strains the family are going through, they get to the church in time for Milla to arrive and kidnap the witch with a drone.

Emma as a vampire

There is some fight to save her, but ultimately she (and Renfield) are taken. Max, who is strangely drawn to Mila, realises that he would have been more successful if he were still a werewolf and tries to use Baba’s stone to re-curse himself; the family intervene, they are all cursed – with mom Emma (Emily Watson) becoming a vampire again, Dad Frank (Nick Frost) becoming Frankenstein’s Monster and sister Fay (Jessica Brown Findlay) becoming a mummy. As they are not happy as a family (again) the curse will remain until they achieve happiness.

Drac the autopilot

The chase is on as Mila looks to kidnap monsters for her parents – who are the megalomaniac type of genius that convinces themselves they do everything for the greater good. There is little in the way of vampire action. Dracula is restricted to a short sequence at front and end of the film, he also appears as a hologram autopilot for the Dracula Jet (the family happen to have), and Emma having a lack of self-control moment when she becomes hungry, staved when given a plasma pill. As for the film itself, it looks lovely – the animation, like the first film, is top notch. The story is perhaps a little less preachy but it relies on set sequences and the musical number is pretty darn poor (though story-centric). There is a gag where Emma tries to hypnotise Mila but it backfires and she causes her self to dance like MC Hammer and it made me think that the scriptwriters were out of touch – the gag works for a man my age but why would a teenage girl now reach back so far into pop culture for a dance, surely there are modern artists she would have chosen?

Mila and manbat Drac

This was inoffensive, and if your kids liked the first one then they should like this. However the classic monsters (in the family) were under-used and the Yeti (Oliver Kalkofe), Nessie and King Konga (Tilo Schmitz) did not make for interesting characterisations. We saw too little of the bad guys for them to develop anything more than cookie cutter villainship. Mila was more rounded and the film really is about her and Max. 4.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

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On Demand @ Amazon UK