A young man's game

TO understand the brash, blitzkrieg humor of "Monster House," the new comic horror film that opens Friday, it's helpful to know that Gil Kenan, the film's 29-year-old first-time director, came to America from Israel at age 7, already half aware that pop culture is the great equalizer. Having arrived in Reseda fresh from the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Kenan knew that as the immigrant kid with a thick accent, he needed to hit the ground running in his new world.

"As an immigrant, you have to compensate somehow for your native headdress by impressing -- you have to work extra hard to get noticed or be taken seriously," he told me the other day, sitting in an office at Sony, the studio that bankrolled "Monster House." "I was shameless. When I'd hear the girls in school talking about the latest episode of 'Silver Spoons,' I'd always say, 'Oh, yeah, I saw that.' "

At age 7, thanks to his dad, he already had an encyclopedic knowledge of outrageous British humor. So when he had a sleepover with a bunch of other 7-year-olds, Kenan brought a copy of "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life," a movie filled with ribald humor about condoms and Catholics, buckets of vomit, an exploding fat man and an elaborate production number about sperm.

"The other parents were so horrified," Kenan recalls, not without a hint of pride, "that they made my parents come pick me up and take me home."

Some audiences may react to the noisy antics of "Monster House" about the same way that parents did to Kenan's Python screening. (And some parents are likely to feel the film is too intense for young children, despite its PG rating.) For me, it was a visual delight to see a house that, thanks to the magic of motion-capture animation, could leap from its moorings and gobble up everyone who steps foot in its yard. Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles enthusiastically wrote that "Monster House" was his favorite film of the summer. But Variety complained about the "ear-splitting sound effects," dismissing the film as "desensitizing," saying "the overriding impression is assaultive to a progressively off-putting degree."

Many critics said the same thing about "The Polar Express," the pioneering 2004 motion-capture film from Robert Zemeckis, who also served as Kenan's godfather in getting "Monster House" made. "Polar Express" went on to gross $172 million in the U.S. alone. But for critics like The Times' Kenneth Turan, the film felt like "loud music at the wrong party," offering "sequences of such exhausting, turbocharged jeopardy that it seems like we've wandered into a Jerry Bruckheimer movie."