The third film in Sony’s animated trilogy sees Genndy Tartakovsky return as director along with the original cast which include Adam Sandler, Selena Gomez, Andy Sandberg, Kevin James, David Spade, Steve Buscemi, Keegan-Michael Key, Molly Shannon, Fran Drescher & Mel Brooks all reprising their roles. Joining the cast is Kathryn Hahn and Jim Gaffigan. Follwing the mildly success of the 2012 & 2015 film, Sony rounded out this trilogy bringing the traditional universal monster together for another adventure.

After spending many years running a monster hotel and also fending off threats from the monster hunter, Van Helsing (Gaffigan), Count Dracula (Sandler) is in need of a vacation. With the help of his daughter Mavis (Gomez) and her husband Johnny (Sandberg), they arrange to take a cruise to the monster paradise known as Atlantis. Joining Drac, Mavis & Johnny as always is Frankenstein (James), his bride (Drescher), the Mummy (Micahel Key), the invisible man (Spade) and the wolf man & his wife (Buscemi & Shannon) and together they all try to enjoy their first vacation in years but things start getting a little fishy when Dracula begins to fall for the ship’s captain, Ericka (Hahn) as Mavis believes she’s hiding a dark secret.

While I wasn’t a fan of the previous 2 films, I still found them somewhat entertaining. This one actually had a special message in it and ending on a positive note, not saying that the previous 2 films didn’t either but they really didn’t have that underlining message like this one. The animation stood out as well. After Disney & Pixar have mastered the craft computer generated films, it seems that Sony & other studios are starting to come around as well. From a storytelling stand point, it does have some similarities to other films like “Beauty & the Beast” & “Corpse Bride”.

This was an entertaining film all the way around and despite some jokes that fall flat. It was fun family film and in my opinion a big step up from the previous film.