It’s party time at the Hotel Transylvania: Mavis, Count Dracula’s daughter, marries Johnny, a mere human who has been adopted by the local monsters. Their issue is Dennis, half human, half monster. Years later, Dracula sees his grandson getting ever more adorable as Mavis and Johnny start thinking of moving to a less dangerous place. When they go to California to visit Johnny’s human parents, Dracula decides to drag along the Werewolf, the Invisible Man, the Mummy and the Blob, in hopes of turning Dennis in to a proper monster along the way…

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Sigh. It’s not that Hotel Transylvania 2 is bad, boring or even lacking in imagination: it skillfully offers spectacular scenes, hilarious bits of slapstick, hidden adult jokes for the adults – all within one-and-a-half, feel-good, Hollywood hours. But Genndy Tartakovsky’s movie, like its future and past competitors, is taken from the mass-market mold, re-formatted and sent down along the assembly line to a target audience who knows in advance what it’s going to be like. Hotel Transylvania 2 did even better than the first at the American box office, and Sony is most likely working on the next installment in the franchise. Which should make you want to stay away instead of yielding to its call.