Hotel Transylvania: Transformania

The monstrous animated franchise gave Adam Sandler the boot and somehow actually got better for its fourth -- and reportedly final -- installment.

I’ve not been a big fan of the “Hotel Transylvania” animated series, in which Adam Sandler voices Dracula as an anxious, kvetching vampire innkeeper with ongoing family/marital problems. They were visually vibrant but tended toward laziness from a storytelling perspective, with Sandler doing his usual baby-talk neurotic shtick, and his standard entourage of buddies getting “make work” gigs: David Spade, Kevin James, Steve Buscemi, etc.

The first movie saw him dealing with the prospect of his beloved vampire daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez), falling in love with a human, the second focused on grandchild worries, the third on navigating post-widower’s love. So the fourth film — and reportedly the last, though we’ll see — takes the next logical step:

Retirement.