Sonic the Hedgehog 2

The Movie Snob takes one on the chin.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2  (D).  Well, the charms of the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie, such as they were, do not reappear in the second installment, which comes straight out of the “louder–bigger–flashier” school of sequel-making.  Sonic’s nemesis Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) manages to escape from the Mushroom Planet and returns to Earth to wreak more havoc.  Wouldn’t you know that he makes his triumphant return the very same weekend that Tom (James Marsden, Disenchanted) and Maddie (Tika Sumpter, The Old Man & the Gun) have left blue alien hedgehog Sonic (voice of Ben Schwartz, Sonic the Hedgehog) home alone for the weekend?  Two new CGI alien critters also appear on the scene: a two-tailed space fox called Tails (voice of Colleen O’Shaughnessey, Toy Story 3), and the most amusing character in this movie, a muscle-bound space echidna called Knuckles (voice of Idris Elba, Thor: Ragnarok).  It’s a snoozer.

Sonic the Hedgehog

The Movie Snob goes slumming.

Sonic the Hedgehog  (C).  How can I, The Movie Snob, give this ridiculous, soulless movie based on a video game such a high grade?  It’s about a blue, hobbit-sized space alien who looks vaguely like a hedgehog, acts like a caffeinated 10-year-old, and runs so fast that time seems to stop when he reaches top speed, for crying out loud!  Hear me out: cute alien Sonic (voice of Ben Schwartz, Renfield) is hiding out on Earth near a small Montana town because bad space aliens want to capture him and harness the energy he can generate.  But then Sonic accidentally causes a huge blackout, setting sinister government forces (led by a scenery-chewing Jim Carry, The Number 23) on his trail.  So he quickly befriends a good-natured local police officer named Tom (James Marsden, Enchanted), and Tom agrees to drive him to San Francisco where, through a dire mischance, Sonic’s little alien rings that would allow him to escape from Earth have been lost and landed atop the Transamerica Pyramid.  It’s all preposterous, but Marsden has an easygoing charm, and I laughed a few times at the silliness and one-liners, so why not give it a C?

The Conservative Sensibility (book review)

A new book review by The Movie Snob.

The Conservative Sensibility, by George F. Will (2019).  This big book (538 pages) is, I suppose, a summing up of famous pundit George Will’s political thinking. His thesis is that the Founders devised the Constitution based on the assumptions that human nature is basically fixed and always contains degrees of ambition and acquisitiveness—thus, the separation of powers. But starting around the beginning of the 20th century, the progressive movement took over and remade the government based on new assumptions: human nature is essentially malleable, modern conditions demand government-by-expert, and we can safely do away with the separation of powers. For his part, Will agrees with the Founders, deplores the rise of the administrative state, and urges the federal judiciary to take a more active role in promoting liberty and restraining the executive branch.  He even has kind words for the Supreme Court’s notorious Lochner decision of 1905!  And he’s not above making the occasional humorous remark, such as when he refers to one of his previous books as “a book read by dozens.” As the book goes on, he also wanders over other topics such as education, foreign policy, and perhaps most interestingly the question of whether only religious people can really be conservative.  (Describing himself as an “amiable, low-wattage atheist,” he naturally answers the question “no.”)  The book is a little rambly and a little repetitive, but I still enjoyed it pretty well.

Toy Story 4

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Toy Story 4 (B).  Okay, now Toy Story 2 is the only member of this franchise that I haven’t seen.  Maybe someday!  Anyhoo, this is another entertaining film that will tug at your heartstrings.  Now our well-established family of toys, led by Sheriff Woody (voice of Tom Hanks, A Hologram for the King), belongs to a little girl named Bonnie (voice of Madeleine McGraw, American Sniper).  Bonnie is very shy on her first day of kindergarten, and to console herself she fashions a little doll out of a used spork, a pipe cleaner, and other detritus.  She loves her new friend Forky (voice of Tony Hale, TV’s Arrested Development), which should make him feel great, right? But no! As soon as Bonnie is out of sight, Forky insists that he is trash and tries to fling himself into the nearest garbage can!  For Bonnie’s sake, Woody makes it his mission to convince Forky that he is a toy, not trash.  But then, on a family road trip, Woody is reunited with Bo Peep (voice of Annie Potts, TV’s Designing Women) and learns that she is a lost toy—meaning she goes wherever and does whatever she pleases.  Forky and Bo shake Woody’s most fundamental belief, that every toy’s singular purpose is to be owned and loved by a child.  What will happen?  The film has a pretty good villain too—Gabby Gabby (voice of Christina Hendricks, TV’s Mad Men), an old doll with a bad voicebox that has been sitting in an antique store for eons, yearning to be taken home by a child.  I was also very amused by a pair of plush toys that get liberated from a carnival-game wall and join the group, and an Evel Knievel parody toy called Duke Caboom, voiced by none other than Keanu Reeves (The Matrix Reloaded).  Definitely worth watching.

Paths of Glory

A new DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Paths of Glory (A-).  Now I’ve notched eight of Stanley Kubrick’s fourteen movies by watching this 1957 release on the Criterion Collection DVD, and the disc was well worth the investment. As my late colleague Roger Ebert wrote in The Great Movies III, this “was the film by which Stanley Kubrick entered the ranks of great directors, never to leave them.” It’s a simple yet horrifying story, economically told in 88 black-and-white minutes. Two years into the trench-warfare stalemate of World War I, two corrupt French generals order a suicidal assault on a fortified German position.  When the attack inevitably fails, one of the generals orders that three surviving soldiers must be court-martialed for cowardice and executed—and he doesn’t care who they are or whether they are guilty. Kirk Douglas (Spartacus) turns in a fine and passionate performance as the colonel who dutifully leads the doomed assault and then serves as defense counsel to the doomed men in their farce of a court-martial trial.  It’s a really exceptional film—look it up!  And check out my reviews of the other Kubrick films I have seen and reviewed: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, The Shining, and Spartacus. (I saw but never got around to reviewing Eyes Wide Shut. I didn’t like it, even though it featured the divine Nicole Kidman.)

Mexican Gothic (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Snob.

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020). I heard a recommendation of this recent novel on a podcast, so I went out and found a copy at my friendly local used bookstore.  I have to say that I was underwhelmed.  It is 1950, and our heroine Noemí is a Mexico City debutante from a good family.  Her beloved cousin Catalina has recently married a mysterious Englishman who whisked her off to his family estate up in the Mexican mountains, and after Catalina sends Noemí’s father a strange letter suggesting some sort of trouble, Noemí is sent to investigate.  What follows is straight out of a British gothic horror novel—a creepy old house surrounded by misty grounds, a handsome but sinister husband for the ailing Catalina, the husband’s weird extended family that also lives in the house, rumors of a dark and disturbing past, lurid nightmares, etc.  The build-up is pretty good, but then the more Moreno-Garcia opts to explain what is going on, the less interesting the book becomes.  Wuthering Heights it is not.  That was my experience, anyway!

Night Train to Munich

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Night Train to Munich (B).  A light-hearted thriller in the vein of The Lady Vanishes, this 1940 release was directed by Carol Reed, who would later direct the classic The Third Man. After an opening montage showing the Nazi advance across Europe before the invasion of Poland, we see an important Czech scientist get whisked away to England just ahead of the Nazi occupation of his home country. Once in England, the scientist is joined by his spirited daughter Anna (Margaret Lockwood, The Lady Vanishes), but then both are kidnaped by the Nazis and it’s up to wise-cracking British agent Gus Bennett (Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady) to pull off a daring solo rescue mission. Paul Henreid, who later played an anti-Nazi freedom fighter in Casablanca, plays against type as a Nazi true believer. Although the movie is not without flaws, I still quite enjoyed it.

Barcelona

The Movie Snob revisits an old favorite.

Barcelona (B+).  I have long enjoyed indie director Whit Stillman’s work, so it’s a shame I still haven’t reviewed all (five) of his movies on this blog.  I recently rewatched this one, the second of his “doomed bourgeois in love” trilogy from the 1990s, and I enjoyed it yet again. It’s the 1980s, and two young American men, Fred and Ted, find themselves in the titular city of Barcelona.  Like most of Stillman’s characters, they are hyperarticulate, constantly musing aloud about the things that matter most to young people—mostly love and commitment, but also concerns about career, success, and finding a place in the modern world. Fred and Ted also happen to be cousins who are more like bickering brothers, and they make a fun odd couple as Fred first unexpectedly drops in on Ted for an extended stay and then tries to liven up his social life.  The movie is unusually political for a Stillman film, with anti-Americanism and terrorism making up an important element of the story.  Watch for Mira Sorvino in a substantial role just a year before her Oscar-winning turn in Mighty Aphrodite.

I have the Criterion Collection DVD and watched several of the extras, including a few talk-show interviews with Stillman that were kind of interesting.  I also rewatched some of the movie with the commentary track turned on.  The commentary featured Stillman and the two stars of the film, Taylor Nichols (The American President) and Chris Eigeman (Metropolitan), and it wasn’t as insightful or as interesting as I had hoped it would be.  Anyway, if you enjoy witty dialogue, you should definitely check out Stillman’s work—his other films being Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, and Love and Friendship.

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Snob.

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, by Neil Price (2020).  If you want to catch up on what archaeologists currently think about the Vikings, I think this is the place to do it.  This 509-page book is interesting and generally very readable. The first half is about the pre-history of the Vikings, with discussions about Viking religion, artifacts, and especially what we have learned from studying their burial mounds. The second half is about the Viking Age itself, when the Vikings starting going on their famous voyages of pillage and exploration around 800 A.D.  I definitely learned some things—like, the Vikings actually conquered and settled in a big chunk of Great Britain, a territory called “Danelaw.” On the whole, and notwithstanding a couple of clunky lines speculating about transgenderism among the pre-medieval Scandinavians, this was a much better and more enjoyable book than the other Viking book I recently read, The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

A new DVD review from The Movie Snob.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) (B-).  I didn’t even realize that there were two Alfred Hitchcock movies by this name when I bought this Criterion Collection DVD quite some time back. This is the older version he directed in England, and apparently it was the movie that propelled him to international fame.  It reminded me a lot of two of the other films from Hitchcock’s early “British” period, namely The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps.  As in those movies, some ordinary British folks accidentally get caught up in events much larger than themselves. Here, a married couple is on vacation in Switzerland when they accidentally come into possession of information about an impending assassination.  And the bad guys kidnap their daughter to keep them quiet!  Will British pluck and common sense see them through the crisis?  It’s not a bad little movie, but I liked The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes better.  Maybe because I had a hard time understanding the dialogue in this one and had to turn the subtitles on?  The accents were pretty thick, and some of the characters seemed to mumble.  I didn’t have time to take in all the numerous extras on the DVD, but there’s an interesting interview with Guillermo del Toro about Hitchcock, and I did re-watch a little of the movie with some film historian’s commentary turned on and found it quite interesting.

Rifftrax Live: The Return of the Swamp Thing

New review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax Live: The Return of Swamp Thing  (B-).  I think this was the only live show that the Rifftrax guys did in 2022, and I didn’t see it live; I just watched it on DVD.  It was decent but not one of the best Rifftrax performances ever.  The movie is really amazingly bad, a 1989 stinker starring the undeniably cute Heather Locklear (The Perfect Man).  She’s a California florist who for some reason decides to go see her sinister stepfather in his creepy mansion somewhere deep in the swamps of Louisiana.  And there’s a swamp thing (Dick Durock, Stand by Me), who is a slimy, green, plant guy who was apparently a normal human who got transformed into a hideous mutant while working on scientific experiments with the aforementioned stepfather. Very goofy and, with the riffing, decently entertaining.

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha (2020).  I liked this recent novel about a handful of smart and/or ambitious folks living in New York City circa 2009.  Sam is a young guy from mid-America who has moved to the Big Apple to pursue a career in journalism. He falls into the orbit of the Doyles, a wealthy family whose patriarch Frank was a well-known political columnist and pundit until an on-air rant got him canceled.  Although Sam’s wife Lucy will be following him to New York in a few months, Sam can’t resist the charms of the Doyles’ aimless daughter Margot. Meanwhile, Margot’s brother Eddie is struggling to reintegrate into society after two tours of duty in Iraq. Yes, pretty much all the characters engage in self-destructive acts, and Sam in particular is a pretty obnoxious tool, but somehow I got very interested in the drama and how all the stories would play out.  I recommend it.

Spartacus

The Movie Snob checks in with a movie review.

Spartacus (C). Ooh, by watching this 3+ hour snoozefest I have now seen half of the 14 full-length films that Stanley Kubrick directed!  (The others that I have seen are Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut)  This one didn’t feel particularly Kubrickian, for some reason; it’s a pretty straightforward (and square) epic about the Roman slave rebellion by a gladiator named Spartacus.  Kirk Douglas (The Big Trees), with that amazingly huge cleft in his chin, plays the title role with great sincerity, and Jean Simmons (Guys and Dolls) unconvincingly plays his love interest, a slave girl named Varinia.  The early part of the movie is decent, but once Spartacus starts his rebellion, the scenes among the rebel forces are ludicrously portrayed as an idyllic vacation in the countryside. The scenes set in Rome are better, and Laurence Olivier (Rebecca) and Charles Laughton (Witness for the Prosecution) are very watchable as scheming Roman senators (and personal enemies).  And the portrayal of the final battle between the rebels and the Roman legions is pretty well done. Still, 3 hours and 17 minutes is a mighty long time!

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

The Movie Snob checks out a phenomenon.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (B?).  Well, I am clearly not the target audience for this concert film.  But the rest of my family is absolutely gaga about Ms. Swift and her music (and her relationship with Travis Kelce), so I have unavoidably become acquainted with some of her songs.  I like some of them pretty well, and even the ones that I don’t especially like are generally fine.  So even though the film is almost three hours, I didn’t mind it too much.  There’s a platoon of stern dancers backing Ms. Swift during many of the songs, and there are visual pyrotechnics galore.  The audio quality is very good. And Swift somehow manages to find enough breath to sing while dancing and marching and running all over the gigantic stage, which is an impressive feat of physical stamina all by itself.  Anyhoo, you should like or love this movie exactly in proportion to how much you like or love Taylor Swift. Shocker, huh?  You heard it here first!

The Annals of Imperial Rome (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Snob.

The Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus (Penguin Classics, translated by Michael Grant). It seems like I’ll never get tired of reading about ancient Rome! I didn’t know much about this book going in, but it turns out that this fellow Tacitus wrote a much longer work about the emperors of the first century A.D. Large parts of it have been lost, but the part we still have covers the reign of Tiberius (14 – 37), part of the reign of Claudius (41 – 54), and a good chunk of the reign of Nero (54 – 68). Suffice to say, if you were a prominent Roman, or a close relative of the emperor, back in those days, your chances of dying of old age were not very good. Poisonings, executions, and banishments litter the pages, which makes for colorful reading for sure!

Christmas With You

More holiday cheer from The Movie Snob!

Christmas With You (C).  The bland title did not inspire confidence in this 2022 Netflix production—and I’m afraid to say that the movie lived up to the title!  Angelina (Aimee Garcia, Robocop (2014)) is a successful pop star whose popularity is just beginning to dip. She’s way behind on the Christmas song her manager wants her to write, so she flees her awesome apartment in New York City to visit a random young fan in the suburbs whose tribute video Angelina just happens to see.  Coincidentally, the fan’s dad is a music teacher–and a widower, and played by former heartthrob Freddie Prinze, Jr. (I Know What You Did Last Summer). Before you know it, they are making beautiful music together!  The efficient 89-minute runtime barely allows the plot, such as it is, to breathe, and I didn’t really sense a lot of chemistry between the two leads. But it’s not terrible.

A Biltmore Christmas

A new Hallmark Christmas movie review from The Movie Snob!

A Biltmore Christmas (B).  It’s Hallmark Christmas movie season again, and we started off with an enjoyable new release.  Obviously the film is set at the beautiful Biltmore estate in North Carolina.  Our heroine Lucy (Bethany Joy Lenz, Extortion) is a Hollywood screenwriter sent to the Biltmore to help her get in the right frame of mind as she works on the script for a remake of a classic movie called “His Merry Wife.” She discovers that she can travel back in time to 1947, just when the movie was being filmed at the Biltmore, and she seizes the opportunity to investigate rumors that the classic movie was originally supposed to have a different, more somber ending. Of course she meets a charming fellow—Jack (Kristoffer Polaha, Jurassic World Dominion), who is an up-and-coming actor with a potential break-out role in the movie. But how can their budding romance work if Lucy returns to 2023? Tune in and find out!  Star Trek stalwarts Jonathan Frakes (TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Robert Picardo (TV’s Star Trek: Voyager) have co-starring roles, which is what actually attracted me to the movie in the first place.

Family Switch

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Family Switch (B). Ooh, I saw a new release! But how new is it really? Not very—it’s Freaky Friday, but redone with a double body switch. The Walkers are a reasonably ordinary family, and as our movie begins (just before Christmas!) there’s quite a bit of friction between Mom and Dad (Jennifer Garner, Yes Day; Ed Helms, We’re the Millers) and their high-school-aged children CC (Emma Myers, TV’s Wednesday) and Wyatt (Brady Noon, Good Boys). Enter a little magic courtesy of an astrologer played by Rita Moreno (West Side Story), and overnight Mom swaps bodies with CC while Dad does the same with Wyatt. Disasters ensue. (Oh, a toddler switches bodies with the family’s French bulldog too, with amusing results.) Will the Walkers learn their lessons after walking a mile in each other’s shoes? Will there be a heartfelt denouement and a lifting of the curse?  Tune in and find out!

We Are Not Ourselves (book review)

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas (2014). The protagonist of this novel is Eileen Tumulty. Born in 1941 to Irish immigrant parents and raised in New York City, she develops a burning ambition to get ahead in life. By page 100, Eileen has gone from age 10 to age 30, and she is married to a fellow named Ed, who is very bright but unfortunately turns out to lack similar ambition. By page 136, another 20 years have passed—and then the story slows down as Ed starts to experience a midlife crisis, or a nervous breakdown, or something even more sinister. I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that this is a very sad and thought-provoking book. After mulling it over, it occurs to me that even though we see mostly the sad, or at least rough, patches in Eileen’s and Ed’s lives together, it is strongly implied that they’re a good match and experienced a lot of happiness too.  Did the happy outweigh the sad, or at least give it a run for the money?  The book leaves you wondering.

Sing

A new movie review from The Movie Snob.

Sing  (B).  I saw the sequel (Sing 2) several months before I saw the original, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the original just fine.  This animated feature is set in a Zootopia-like world of anthropomorphic animals.  Our protagonist is Buster Moon (voice of Matthew McConaughey, Sahara), a koala who is the wildly optimistic owner of the town’s run-down live-performance theater.  The creditors are at the door, so Buster hatches a scheme to raise money with a live singing competition show for a $1,000 prize. But a misprint in the flyer turns it into a $100,000 prize, and complications ensue.  Will the show come together?  Can Buster and his ragtag group of amateurs save the theater?  The plot is awfully similar to the sequel. I noticed that a slacker sheep (voice of John C. Reilly, Cedar Rapids) and a Sinatra-esque mouse (voice of Seth MacFarlane, TV’s The Orville) are important characters in Sing but did not come back for Sing 2. The girl-power porcupine Ash (voice of Scarlett Johansson, The Island) is a standout in both movies.

I Am C-3PO (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story, by Anthony Daniels (2020). This is a memoir about Star Wars by the actor who played the droid C-3PO in an amazing nine movies.  It’s an enjoyable read.  Daniels jumps right into his experiences in making the original Star Wars, which was his very first film.  The costume, as you might expect, was a big pain.  The book is full of interesting stories about making the movies, which I won’t divulge here, and other (mis)adventures (like Daniels’s missing the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back because he had the flu—and blood poisoning!). On the down side, Daniels says very little about his much more famous co-stars, and he occasionally wanders off into less-interesting byways.  (Like an account of an early Star Wars convention in Denver where it rained a bunch.)  Still, the book is an enjoyable romp, and at only 265 pages it is not a huge commitment.  Star Wars fans should definitely check this book out!

The Lady Vanishes

A DVD review from The MovieSnob.

The Lady Vanishes (B).  An unexpected gift of a couple of free hours fell into my lap, so I went to my DVD collection and grabbed the first one I saw that would fit the time I had—this 1938 classic directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  It is an enjoyable romance-comedy-thriller that reminded me of The 39 Steps (not that I remember that film very well).  Anyhoo, the lovely Margaret Lockwood (Night Train to Munich) plays Iris, a young British woman who has been enjoying herself with some friends in some fictional central European country. Alas, now she is returning to England to marry some dull aristocrat. But before she boards the train, she befriends a pleasant older British lady who is making the same trip, and shortly after the train gets underway—the older lady disappears!  Making matters worse, most of the people on the train deny that they ever even saw the lady!  Is Iris losing her marbles?  Will the charming rogue that Iris met the night before the train ride began (Michael Redgrave, Mourning Becomes Electra) come to her aid?  Tune in and find out!  I watched the Criterion Collection version of the movie, which is top notch.  It comes with a separate commentary track by some critic, and a second DVD packed with extras, but I didn’t have time to indulge in any of that except for a little of the commentary track, which was pretty interesting.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The Movie Snob checks in with a DVD review.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets  (C-).  Despite being a big Lord of the Rings fan, I have never gotten into Harry Potter.  I never read the books, and I saw a random sampling of maybe three of the movies back in the day.  But my daughter is getting old enough for at least the first couple of movies, so I recently watched this one for the first time.  It’s a meandering slog of a movie (2 hours and 41 minutes) with only a couple of highlights—namely a creepy encounter with a horde of giant spiders, and a climactic battle with a monster at the end.  Otherwise, it’s mostly sleuthing by the trio of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe, What If), Ron (Rupert Grint, Cherrybomb), and Hermione (Emma Watson, Noah) as they try to figure out who or what is stalking the halls of Hogwarts and turning students (and one cat) to stone. Because a whole faculty of fully fledged wizards and witches can’t figure it out, apparently. Kenneth Branagh (Dunkirk) pops up and seems to really enjoy himself as a purported wizarding wunderkind who makes the ladies swoon.

Something Wholesale (book review)

A new review from the desk of The Movie Snob.

Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade, by Eric Newby (first published in 1962). This is an entertaining little memoir by the British fellow who wrote about his experience as an escaped POW in WWII Italy in Love and War in the Apennines.  After WWII, he returns to England, leaves the armed forces, and goes to work in the family business, which is wholesaling women’s clothing. He is not exactly a natural fit, to say the least, and I laughed out at some of his misadventures and clever turns of phrase. His account of a miserable overnight train ride in a non-sleeping car reminded me of some of my own experiences traveling around Europe on a Eurail pass back in the 80s.

Monster High 2

The Movie Snob suffers through a new made-for-streaming movie.

Monster High 2  (D).  After a mediocre opener, the Monsters High franchise is back with an even more lackluster sequel!  So, Hogwarts-clone Monster High has become more accepting of monsters that are a little different, like ones that have a human parent and ones that want to practice witchcraft.  Our half-human, half-werewolf heroine Clawdeen (Miia Harris, Monster High: The Movie) is even running for student council president.  Enlightened!  But then a mysterious attack by witches threatens to unravel the students’ tolerance for difference, and Clawdeen’s pal Draculaura (Nayah Damasen, Monster High: The Movie) goes on a daring diplomatic mission to see if an enduring truce can be struck between monsters and witches.  Is treachery afoot?  Are there lame song-and-dance numbers?  Will there be a Monster High 3?  Yes, yes, and I fear the answer is yes . . . .