Movie Review: Monster High: Scaremester & New Ghoul @ School

Monster High: Scaremester & New Ghoul @ School
Mattel Entertainment, Wildbrain Entertainment,  USA 2010, 2014.

DVD named "Monster High Fang-tastic Double Pack: Scaremester & New Ghoul @ School" contains stories based on Mattel's doll series.

New Ghoul @ School

Frankie Stein is a new student in Monster High. She has trouble finding friends, but eventually she gets two friends vegetarian vampire Draculaura and werewolf Clawdeen. Frankie gets on the bad side of school's diva Cleo De Nile. Frankie tries to attend clubs but always tries too much to be something that she isn't and fails. She wants to join the fearleading team (cheerleaders) but Cleo is their captain and the results are catastrophic. You better keep it real, girl! (Also knowing a famous pop star doesn't hurt).

Cleo, Ghoulia & Frankie

New best friends

Clawdeen, Frankie & Draculaura.. and some guy wearing a sack

Voice actors: Kate Higgins, Salli Saffioti, Debi Derryberry, Laura Bailey, Yuri Lowenthal, Audu Paden, Troy Baker
Directors: Audu Paden, Eric Radomski

Scaremester consists of 18 short webisodes from season 3 and 4.

Dodgeskull
Bullyish Manny Taur doesn't want zombies on his Dodgeskull-team. Zombie girl Ghoulia challenges Manny to a match. As a double visual pun Manny has a red t-shirt (worn by a bull!) that reminds of his ancestral home.

Ghoulia

Heath Burns and Manny Taur

A Perfect Match
The girls are going to Fright Day night dance ball. No-one has asked yeti girl Abbey Bominable out so the girls suggest speed-dating. One of the failed candidates is an often seen background character, a tall cyclops boy.

Tall cyclops and Abbey

Hoodoo That Voodoo That You Do
Hoodude is a voodoo doll guy. If he holds an item belonging to someone else, that someone will feel the pain if Hoodude hurts himself. Mischievous kitty Toralei and other cat girls use that feature to play pranks.

Hoodude and Toralei

Unearthed Day
Plant girl Venus McFlytrap tries to teach students to recycle. The girls help by making fashion clothes out of trash.

Creature of the Year
Headless Headmistress Bloodgood asks Frankie & friends to select a teacher of the year but neither Mr. Hackington or Mr. Rotter are good candidates. Mr. Rotter looks like Lon Chaney Sr. in "Phantom of the Opera."

Cleo & Mr. Rotter

Undo the Voodoo
Hoodude is having a bad day and everybody suffers. Frankie asks Scarah Screams to read his mind and find out what's wrong.

Sad.

The Stitch-uation
A new hunky centaur-boy Archer comes to school. Toralei and Operetta (rockabilly daughter of Phantom of the Opera) try to flirt with him but he is not interested.

Archer

The Halls Have Eyes
Manny, flame guy Heath Burns and zombie dude Slo-Mo want to be safety officers of the school. Also gargoyle Rochelle wants to be a safety officer but her friends keep trying to corrupt her.

Rochelle

Angry Ghouls
Draculaura gets addicted to mobile game Angry Ghouls. The addiction spreads quickly and only robot girl Robecca can stop it. I think I have seen a similar game somewhere. It had something to do with birds and pigs.

Angry Ghouls

I Scream, You Scream
Cleo attends a cooking show but she forgets to memorize the recipes. Maybe Scarah Scream's telepathic skills will help.

Scarah Screams

Fierce Crush
Everybody has a boyfriend except Clawdeen's little sister Howleen Wolf.

Party Undead
It's Friday the 13th, 2013 and a big party night. Heath plays a video game and finds a sinister conspiracy.

We Are Monster High
New students come to school but the senior students seem to have something to hide. Unusual episode for it is shown from first-person perspective, basically welcoming the viewer to Monster High.

Eye of the Boo-Holder
Everyone is making projects for the Art Class. Who will create the best work?

Who's the Boo Girl
New student Jane Boolittle appears and does some anthropological observations.

Scream Spirit
New members of fearleading team need some coaching to utilize their skills. Notice that Manny's labyrinth shirt now points at the another direction.

Spot the eyeball dude in the crowd

Master of Hiss-Guise
Famous actress Elissabat visits the school incognito so no-one can recognize her (yeah, right!).

Join the Scream
Toralei is not a team-player but when she is taunted by the opponents she helps Monster High to win some games.

That's for the descriptions, now for some comments.

Monster High is a toy line with characters that are teen offspring of classic monsters, aimed to goth-oriented girls who like fashion dolls. However it is quite surprising that Mattel hasn't fully harnessed the potential and for example hasn't made a spin-off series for boys for example as the monsterific characters could also appeal to them if the focus was adjusted from fashion to for example adventure themes. Just saying, and I'm sure Mattel does their marketing decisions by reading obscure blogs such as this.

The franchise are backed by a series of movies and TV-specials. "New Ghoul" is a TV-special but the Scaremester episodes are part of the web series, that can be viewed on Monster High's Youtube channel. "New Ghoul" has also a more dramatic story, as the short episodes are more comedic in nature. The couple of minute long episodes are made with 2D-animation but longer films use CGI-animation. These episodes on the DVD were enjoyable, with a lot of references to classic horror, mainly Universal's. It seems that the makers have done their home work about the tropes associated to monsters and know types of monsters from different parts of the world. In the background you can spot amusing looking characters and even Claude Rains' Invisible Man. It can't be said to be scary although it plays with gothic imagery, skulls, bats, graveyards and dark dungeons. More it is school comedy with romantic subplots with focus of importance of being unique and accepting flaws in self and others. Most of the humour relies on humorous puns, no headstone is left unturned for making jokes. There are monsterified versions of contemporary phenomena such as pop star Justin Biter and popular phone iCoffin. The characters have their own personalities, that are usual in high school stories (nice girl, energetic girl, smart girl, diva, bully boy, ladies man, sensible girl and so on) but with some playful upturning of expectations. The smartest girl is a zombie, vampire hates blood and so on. However the last half of the episodes begin to suffer, as many characters come and go, being on focus for just one episode. This is not necessarily the fault of the series, but the selection of episodes in the disc. Also the theme song begins to annoy at some point. Otherwise it is fairly fun comedy with adorable monster characters.

Rating: Good