Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		2.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.0

Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights Blu-ray Movie Review

Scary. But not in a good way.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman July 4, 2015

"Scaris"="Paris" and "City of Frights"="City of Lights." Get it? More Monster High puns. Yay! Mattel's teenage "monster" franchise has become such a, well, monster hit that the dolls, backpacks, lunch boxes, T-shirts, and other assorted memorabilia are pretty much all anyone sees at the likes of Wal-Mart and Target anymore, never mind down the hallowed halls of elementary and middle schools all over the country. And it's all thanks to puns. No, these aren't sharp characters; they don't operate in pinpoint, deep stories; and the lessons they learn aren't complex. It's a safe bet that the pun comes first and the story comes second. If "Paris" can become "Scaris" (which also doubles for "scare us," how clever!) and the characters can go "fright seeing" and visit such landmarks as "The Eiffel Terror," then, hey, there's a movie right there. Toss in some fashion design -- the "ghouls" of Monster High are always hip and happening and slaves to the latest trends (until the realize the power of individuality at the end of one movie or special and go back to being slaves of trends in the next movie) and voilà! A Monster High movie is born.

Fashionable.

The ghouls of Monster High are doing their own thing, like they always do, and this time they're putting on a fashion show. It's uploaded to Fright Tube for the world to see, and little do they know it's about to make one of them a star. In Scaris, a world-renowned fashion designer named Moanatella Ghostier (voiced by Cindy Robinson) spots the video and contacts Clawdeen Wolf (voiced by Salli Saffioti) with an invitation to compete for an open apprenticeship. Clawdeen and several of her best ghoul friends head to Scaris. Their guide is a Scaris native named Rochelle (voiced by Laura Bailey) who is eager to return to her hometown and search for her missing boyfriend, Garrott DuRoque. As Clawdeen settles in and quickly learns that she'll have to scrap everything she knows about fashion if she's to satisfy her teacher and get the gig, her friends learn a terrible secret about what's really going on behind-the-scenes with Ghostier and her apprentices.

OK, OK. Target audience and so and so forth. Yup, a thirty-something Blu-ray reviewing male isn't exactly Monster High's intended demographic. It's true. So anyone with all the dolls lining the bedroom shelf, the lunchbox waiting to return to duty in the fall, the posters on the wall, the branded clothes on the floor in a ball, ignore this review. For parents: be warned. This stuff is grating. It's hard to watch, practically impossible to love, and so transparent it hurts. Though the crude plot changes from movie to movie, the themes are the same: something's fishy, the girl investigate, they learn some valuable life lesson at the end. But for that to work every time, they need to conveniently forget everything they've learned and learn it all again. This time, like always, it seems, it's a variation on the theme of individuality, about being oneself, in this case, about Clawdeen realizing that it's not worth sacrificing her creativity, her vision, her likes, to favor those of another, even if it would mean getting ahead in life. And, of course, even if she hadn't learned that lesson, her apprenticeship would come back to bite her, anyway, because there's something amiss deep in the bowels of Ghsotier's fashion design central.

It doesn't help that the movie looks terrible, as in murky, soft, dull terrible. It's odd at best and disconcerting at worst to see character colors, glitz, and glamour be hampered by such a lousy animation style that doesn't fit the world in the least. How can one take a story about high fashion that takes place in the cultural center of the monster universe seriously when it looks this depressingly dreary? Maybe that's the thirty something male talking again, but the animation makes this film -- most of the series, for that matter -- an even tougher pill to swallow when it's not even a pretty sight that might make a watch tolerable with the sound down. Maybe if all of the Monster High movies and specials looked like this rather than this, they'd be a little more bearable. At least the former looks nice but, yeah, either way these reviews really aren't all that much fun.

Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights once again arrives on Blu-ray, as discussed above, with a dull, muddy 1080p transfer that's hardly an improvement over DVD. The animation is inherently hideous, producing dreary colors that don't pop. Even what should be bright, vibrant hair accents, clothing hues, and other loud colors fail to move the needle even a smidgen. Details are equally poor. Raw definition is lacking; there's a soft, muddy texture to the entire image. Everything from wooden desks to clothes and from Scaris' streets to character hair yield only the most simple textures. The transfer suffers through some minor, but annoying, bits of aliasing and jagged edges; a perfect examples is evident on the edges of airplane seats in chapter four. But the biggest problem is that the movie looks like a DVD. It's a fully unattractive image that screams "cheap," and for something as popular as Monster High it's a wonder this passes for quality animation.

Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

At least Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights sounds pretty good. Universal's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack is active and energetic, offering a cheery, lively, and spacious musical presentation that handles Pop tunes and score alike with equal attention to detail and room-filling goodness. The track presents quite a few effects to varying degrees of heft and presence. Light jet engine hums help support flight scenes while crashes, booms, howls, and other more dominant effects enjoy solid aural definition and placement. Dialogue is clearly defined and grounded in the front-center speaker.

Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights contains no film-related supplements but does feature two episodes of Ever After High. Inside the Blu-ray case, buyers will find a DVD copy of the film as well as a voucher for a UV/iTunes digital copy.

• Ever After High Special: "Legacy Day" (1080p, 22:53).
• Ever After High Special: "True Hearts Day" (1080p, 23:30).
• Previews (1080p): Monster High: Haunted, Monster High: Freaky Fusion, Monster High: Frights, Camera, Action, Monster High: Clawseome Double Feature, Monster High: 13 Wishes, Monster High: Ghouls Rule, and Monster High: Double Feature.

Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Monster High: Scaris, City Of Frights, and the series as a whole, is so manufactured, trite, and repetitive that it's a wonder it's as successful as it is. Add that the animation (most of the time) stinks, the characters are nearly empty beyond their pun-infensted names and the world in which they live, and that every movie seems to simply rework variations of the same theme, and the result is an epic failure that's still managed to soar in the marketplace. This thirty-something guy just doesn't get it, apparently, but he does get that the Blu-ray's picture quality is disappointingly dull but limited to whatever the dreary, sloppy source provides. The lossless soundtrack isn't bad. Supplements are comprised of a couple of episodes of the next big thing reviewers will love to hate. Skip it.