Would you believe this is a PG-rated Halloween horror movie for tiny tots? Trick or treat!

‘Way too scary for tykes and far too juvenile for teens, this ominous monstrosity falls into a pre-adolescent abyss.

In an otherwise sunny neighborhood squats this mysteriously menacing haunted house where kids’ toys mysteriously get swallowed up if they accidentally happen to land on the lawn. Guarding this decrepit, decaying domicile is a grouchy old geezer named Nebbercracker (voiced by Steve Buscemi). So, the day before Halloween, when cantankerous Nebbercracker is hauled off in an ambulance to the hospital with an apparently fatal heart attack, a curious 12 year-old, DJ (voiced by Mitchel Musso), who lives across the street, his chubby buddy Chowder (voiced by Sam Lerner) and a cheeky Girl Scout cookie sales-kid Jenny (voiced by Spencer Locke) decide to investigate the spooky premises, unbeknownst to the dismissive teenage Goth babysitter (voiced by Maggie Gyllenhaal) - “I don’t do board games or tuck-ins” - and her slacker boyfriend (voiced by Jon Heder).

Utilizing the same eerie, stylized motion-capture technology as “The Polar Express,” first-time director Gil Kenan, under the sponsorship of Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, crafts a creepy, computer-animated creature feature. With its shingles shuddering and its windows lit up like yellow eyes, the strangely spiteful, crumbling, carnivorous house (voiced by Kathleen Turner) stomps, snarls and snaps, its wooden beams turning into sharp teeth and its Oriental carpet-runner becoming a threatening tongue.

In various venues, “Monster House” is also being released in 3-D which, I suspect, is even spookier. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Monster House” is a malevolent 5 – if you happen to be a child. If you’re an adult, you went into the wrong theater.