WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Sony's Hotel Transylvania 3, in theaters now.


Most of the drama in Sony's animated Hotel Transylvania franchise usually comes from within. The 2012 original was all about Dracula (Adam Sandler), while being the movie's protagonist, behaving like a villain in preventing his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) from falling in love with a human, Johnny (Andy Samberg). The 2015 sequel then dealt with Dracula's family going through the motions with his own father Vlad (Mel Brooks) and his new grandson Dennis (Asher Blinkoff), whose vampirism hadn't manifested.

However, the latest chapter, Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, adopts a more direct approach by introducing a pair of aggressive antagonists -- legendary vampire slayer Abraham Van Helsing and his granddaughter Ericka -- into the narrative. Here, they're monster hunters with no sympathy. However, they don't do the family name any justice, coming off as incompetent. All right, they're downright terrible.

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The movie's opening sequence swiftly establishes that, as director/co-writer Genndy Tartakovsky paints Abraham (Jim Gaffigan) as someone obsessed for decades with killing Dracula, but failing time and again. He's very much like Wile E. Coyote as he bumbles each attempt to best Road Runner. At every turn, Dracula shape-shifts, flies away or uses his physical prowess to elude the aging Abraham, whose frustration grows as he endures injuries. That culminates in him replacing broken body parts with machinery, basically transforming him into a steampunk monster hunter. This evolution stands as a constant reminder of the ineptness of Abraham Van Helsing in his hunt for the biggest trophy in vampire slaying.

Alas, as the baton passes to Abraham's granddaughter, there's little sign of improvement from generation to generation. Ericka (Kathryn Hahn) works with him aboard a cruise ship in the Bermuda Triangle, which serves as a trap to lure monsters to their death. While Abraham masterminds the hunt from the control room, Ericka repeatedly attempts to murder Dracula, only to fail just as badly as her grandfather did. From shooting flares at her target to trying to drop lifeboats and crates on Dracula, she simply cannot slay him as he unwittingly evades all her efforts. It gets worse as she realizes she's fallen in love with him.

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The thing is, there isn't even a backup scheme, because Abraham is locked inside his control room, with a malfunctioning body that barely moves. While Ericka is off betraying their mission, he has to sit back and wait for some stroke of dumb luck. Of course, it does come when he gets his hands on a relic that allows him to summon a squid-like leviathan from the depths of the Lost City of Atlantis, but that's a result of coincidence, not shrewd planning. Love is the real weapon, because Dracula attained the artifact to impress Ericka during their courtship. Other than that, the Van Helsings show no genius at all.

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Apart from being clueless, it's only the two of them, so they don't even have strength in numbers. So when Ericka abandons ship (no pun intended), and Abraham is left to fend for himself, one would have expected the elder Van Helsing to have a solid master plan in his back pocket, especially with the relic literally in hand. Lo and behold, he uses it to control the leviathan by making it angry through, well, dubstep music. It's such a weak plan, which is easily overcome by Johnny being a better DJ and having the creature obey his family instead of the villain. Abraham's disastrous tenure comes full circle as Dracula saves him from the creature, leaving the antagonist defeated and admitting his legacy was wrong and hateful.

They all make amends, leading to Dracula and Ericka looking at getting hitched. However, you can't help but feel the movie's missing that extra flair and intimidation from an awesome villain, a la the Despicable Me or Incredibles movies. That said, clearly Tartakovsky wanted to his antagonists this clumsy and, well, impotent in order to soften them up for a family film -- what with their goal being monster genocide and whatnot. Humor balances off their sinister characteristics, after all.

Still, they should have at least come with an army or some contingency measures if they really wanted to duel with monsters. Abraham Van Helsings, when all is said and done, is known as Dracula's greatest foe. Summer Vacation makes him and his granddaughter nothing more than a punchline, albeit one that serves so many hilarious jokes for families to soak in.


Directed by returning filmmaker Genndy Tartakovsky, Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation stars returning cast members Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Kevin James, Steve Buscemi, David Spade, Keegan-Michael Key, Molly Shannon, Fran Drescher and Mel Brooks.