JD T

I hate netflix for cancelling this show. One of the first good things in years and it's sent to the glue factory. Watch this show and love it as I have, just stop giving netflix applause for doing the bare minimum when it ends up doing stuff like this in the end.

This movie brought me to tears 4 times- trust me, I counted. Slumberland brings back your favorite characters from the 90s and late 00s movies you know and love and splices them into a found family motion picture about grief and trauma and learning to be whole again, with a little bit of fantastical magic being used to bring it all back together. Jason Momoa's character Flip splices Beetlejuice's titular villain with Little Monster's lovable Maurice and adds a slight hint of family love into the two characters to make Flip, a goat-man who comes off as an anti-hero in the beginning but as the story is told will quickly become your favorite (albeit incredibly annoying) dream. Meanwhile, Nemo, (played by Marlow Barkley - Great name by the way) plays a grieving young girl filled with wit and passion which I couldn't help but link to Bridge of Terabithia's Leslie. The plotline is brilliant, and this is one of the very few movies that seem to follow Disney's "Heros' Journey" but still seem fresh, fun, and lovely for the family. You will fall In love with this movie if you're the kind of person who enjoys action-adventure with a good, solid mix of emotional distress. And all of this without mentioning the graphics and animation, which is absolutely stunning. Needless to say, if you want a good 2 hours used wisely, this movie is the place to visit. My only regret is that I didn't see it for the first time on the big screen.

The movie itself was pretty okay overall, the plot was somewhat engaging, albeit I wasn't too connected to the characters. It had some pretty stunning realism when it came to the abuse and trauma factors- to those in the 1-star section saying that a malnourished, dirty boy wouldn't be forgotten or looked over in schools in the way he was are simply dead wrong, speaking from experience through loved ones. There were some things that didn't fully make sense, probably because my attention half the time was elsewhere, but there is one thing that makes this 4 instead of 3 stars- The Monster is brilliant. Plain and simple, it is a terrible creature that must have taken so, so much time to do and it was so cool to watch in its moments. It made me feel so, so ill while seeing it and that was absolutely stellar. You can see the love that went into it, or maybe not love but the "this is awful but I cannot stop making it worse" feeling that a lot of artists know when creating creatures like this one. It's what bought me into the movie and brought me toward the end. It's any person's dream for a monster like that to be praised, but that is just by appearance. In behavior, we didn't see the magnum opus monster till toward the end, we saw its masquerade. It didn't have much of the lore on the creature it was based on- How it can mimic people, how it stalks for days upon weeks, how it doesn't just eat its food but plays with it. It also didn't come from infection, may I add, as the creature itself is a whole species in most stories I've known. Naturally, though, you got to remember that this is an artistic rendition of an already well-known monster, so things aren't going to be wholly accurate. So in summary, it was a bland monster until its true face was revealed. TL;DR - The movie was forgettable and definitely tried to be more suspenseful than horrifying (which isn't bad but doesn't always translate well from writing to screenplays), but the monster was made with so much love and terror that this review just fell apart into a rating of the monster shown in the final minutes of the movie. Good job to those who made the creature!