If you have seen the trailer, you have pretty much seen the movie, because the few good bits are all in it, and there is little story to tell. A trio of kids figure out that an old creaky house is alive and dangerous, but they can't convince any adults, so they have to take care of the problem on their own. There actually is a halfway decent explanation for why the house is haunted, which emerges in the last act, but this revelation is not enough to compensate for the rest of the movie, which has a rambling, lethargic quality in between its explosions of action.

As is often the case with computer-generated animation, the human characters are ghastly in their robotic look and movements. The talented vocal cast tries to breathe some life into them, but they are hardly helped by the dreary dialogue, whose idea of a big joke is talking about two characters who urinate into a bottle because they don't want to take their eyes off the house long enough for a bathroom break.

The pacing and story structure and badly mangled. An opening scene of a girl on a tricycle, accompanied by a leaf blowing in the wind, seems to go on forever, as if it were some show-stopping, crowd-pleasing musical musical number, instead of what it really is - the animators and director pointlessly indulging in showing off the CGI medium. (NOTE TO FILMMAKERS: The fact that you can do something does not mean that you should do something.)

A climactic moment when the kids enter the house takes place midway through. This excursion into the "lion's den," fraught with potential danger, should be the film's ending, but instead they get regurgitated from the building and the filmmakers try to figure out some way to top what should have been their closer. The attempt fails, with an overdone ending in which the house uproots itself and terrorizes the trio like a Frank Lloyd Wright version of King Kong. Unfortunately, the effects for this sequence are just okay; as far as mammoth monsters go, Godzilla need not fear that his throne is threatened.