After \u201cThe Nightmare Before Christmas\u201d and \u201cCorpse Bride,\u201d \u201cMonsters, Inc.\u201d and \u201cCoraline,\u201d \u201cVampirina\u201d and \u201cSuper Monsters,\u201d and too many \u201cAddams Family\u201d and \u201cHotel Transylvania\u201d movies to count, the gothic ghoulie kiddie comedy is now as mainstream as any Disney princess fantasy, and in many cases as wholesome.<\/p>\n
Timed for Halloween, \u201cStitch Head\u201d (opening today) is an animated bauble, financed independently in Europe, so you\u2019d think it would have a bit of an edge to it. The title character is a lost-boy version of Frankenstein\u2019s monster, with a bald, patched-together noggin that looks like a skin-sewn baseball. He\u2019s got a swatch of brown around his left eye, for that cobbled-together-out-of-spare-parts effect, and once he becomes a carnival sideshow attraction he starts wearing Freddy Krueger\u2019s sweater. Beneath the monster-movie trappings, though, he\u2019s just a winsome British urchin looking for a home.<\/p>\n
Based on the graphic novel by Guy Bass and Pete Williamson, \u201cStitch Head\u201d has an elegantly debauched visual flair \u2014 a look of puckish spookiness. I was encouraged by the opening minutes, which feature images of a medieval stone village that are painterly in a skewed way, like \u201cThe Cabinet of Dr. Caligari\u201d revamped by Pixar. One by one, the voice-cast names appear under the following designations: The Freakish (Asa Butterfield), The Gruesome (Joel Fry), The Demented (Rob Brydon), The Hideous (Tia Bannon), The Repulsive (Jamali Maddix), and The Repugnant (Ryan Sampson). I thought: sounds like my cup of nightmare kiddie camp.<\/p>\n
But \u201cStitch Head,\u201d while it remains visually clever, has a bare-bones script that makes it feel like a Pixar movie the writers forgot to add enough jokes to. It seems to be going for the punk spirit that defined the delinquent-kid-next-door sections of \u201cToy Story,\u201d but those toys were damaged. These monsters are just fuzzy-creepy-cute. And while it\u2019s fine that the movie is knocking off \u201cFrankenstein\u201d (though Tim Burton did that 20 years ago), it\u2019s also knocking off other things left and right \u2014 starting with Burton\u2019s whole walking-dead-on-happy-pills sensibility, which is does a very toned-down version of.<\/p>\n
Stitch Head, voiced with forlorn innocence by Asa Butterfield, was the first monster hatched in the laboratory of the Professor (Brydon), an absent-minded mad scientist who is less Frankenstein than Doc from \u201cBack to the Future.\u201d He presides over Castle Grotteskew, high on a twisted cliff above the town of Grubbers Nubbin, where he\u2019s created a whole menagerie of monsters (frog on a coiled spring, baby-voiced shark, two-headed caterpillar, scarlet puffball), who are knockoffs of the ones in \u201cMonsters, Inc.\u201d The main creature, who is named (wait for it) Creature, is a furry, floppy-eared cyclops who sports a slender human third arm but basically looks like a cross between that film\u2019s two main characters.<\/p>\n
The central joke is a familiar and benign one: People are supposed to be afraid of monsters, but up in Castle Grotteskew it\u2019s the monsters who are scared \u2014 of an \u201cangry mob,\u201d like the one that shows up at the end of \u201cFrankenstein.\u201d We know they\u2019re scared of it because the film alludes to their ironic terror about 100 times.<\/p>\n
With the Professor as self-involved absentee daddy, Stitch Head doesn\u2019t feel like he\u2019s getting much love at home. So he runs away to join the geek circus led by Fulbert Freakfinder (Seth Usdenov), a greedy ringmaster who leers and proclaims like an exploitation-film version of Jim Broadbent\u2019s Harold Zidler in \u201cMoulin Rouge!\u201d He utters the word \u201cmoan-stuh!\u201d a lot and says things like, \u201cWould you not care to blight your lovely eyes forever with one brief glimpse of a thing most horrid and foul?!\u201d He puts Stitch Head on display, which initially inspires each patron to scream in panic after getting a glimpse of him. But it\u2019s not long before Stitch Head has become a rock star of fear, bolstered by merch like commemorative plates and bottle openers.<\/p>\n
There are a handful of jaunty musical numbers, like Fulbert singing \u201cMake \u2019em Scream\u201d (\u201cThere\u2019s nothing quite as gorgeous as an audience that\u2019s nauseous!\u201d), but the movie, despite its storybook images, is rather toothless, with a plot that runs out of gas. In the end, of course, an angry mob does chase the monsters around the castle, only to be chased by them in return (the monsters having rediscovered their reason for being), which results in some serviceable monster slapstick. Stitch Head, still looking for a family, will bond with Arabella (Tia Bannon), the town moppet in giant spectacles and pigtails, and he\u2019ll be rescued by Creature, a one-note character who is, in a word, dim, though that makes him perfect to blink his big green eye and say, \u201cYou\u2019re my bestest best friend, remember?\u201d \u201cStitch Head\u201d is a mild black comedy for 7-year-olds that never hesitates to put the horror on hold for a hug.<\/p>\n
Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source nz.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After \u201cThe Nightmare Before Christmas\u201d and \u201cCorpse Bride,\u201d \u201cMonsters, Inc.\u201d and \u201cCoraline,\u201d \u201cVampirina\u201d and \u201cSuper Monsters,\u201d and too many \u201cAddams Family\u201d and \u201cHotel Transylvania\u201d movies to count, the gothic ghoulie kiddie comedy is now as mainstream as any Disney princess fantasy, and in many cases as wholesome. Timed for Halloween, \u201cStitch Head\u201d (opening today) is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2123629,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[370342,336192,403288,21911,403284,403286,350031,403283,403285,393298,403287],"class_list":["post-2123628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-asa-butterfield","tag-frankenstein","tag-fulbert-freakfinder","tag-inc","tag-monsters","tag-pixar-movie","tag-rob-brydon","tag-stitch-head","tag-super-monsters","tag-the-nightmare-before-christmas","tag-tia-bannon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/A-Kiddie-\u2018Frankenstein-with-an-Elegant-Gothic-Look-But-Too.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2123628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2123630,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123628\/revisions\/2123630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2123629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2123628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2123628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2123628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}