Sometimes it’s better to leave well enough alone, and in the case of Where the Wild Things Are, which Warner Brothers sent me a copy of, this is one of those times.

Max, a nine year old with some serious anger management problems, is about to be sent to bed with no dinner when he bolts from his recently divorced mother’s house into the night.  After wrecking up some innocent cordwood, he discovers a boat and sails off into nowhere in particular, where somehow, he manages to find his way to a land full of enormous furry monsters.  But rather than eating Max alive, they end up making him their king, mostly because he’s wearing a furry suit that makes him look kind of like a smaller version of monster, and because he also is a master of thoroughly improbable lies.

You’ll have a difficult time telling, from the first minute and a half or so, that this isn’t in fact one of those “children gone insane / evil” horror flicks, because Max has some serious hyperactivity problems.  In fact, in another movie, Max would be torturing small animals and possibly taking a butcher knife to some people by the time the whole thing was over.  But that’s not what we get here, of course–here, we get the egomaniacal child-emperor of Monster Land who apparently we’re all supposed to feel bad for because his parents got divorced and he’s well on his way to schizophrenia or possibly even pure-on sociopathic behavior, but thanks to an extended hallucination, he comes back somewhat better.

Yeah, I’m not buying it either.

And the worst part of it is, I grew up with Maurice Sendak’s book.  I loved where The Wild Things Are.  Max didn’t throw extended temper tantrums and destroy things and make me think that it was only a matter of time before he started slitting his family’s throats in the night in the book.

And yet, maybe, this is just supposed to be a look into a fantasy world, and on that score, this succeeds by a wide margin.  Because this world really is a wild fantasy-scape, so if this is just trying to be a look at a weird child’s fantasy, it works.

However, on any narrative sense, this thing is so lost as to be ludicrous.  Nothing here makes any kind of sense.  Things happen for no clear reason on a semiminutely basis. Seriously, I was an hour and ten minutes into the thing, and only a half hour left, and all I could say was, what the hell is the POINT?

So that’s what you’re left with at the end of the day, folks.  Either you want to watch a movie that looks cool and presents a really great look at a child’s fantasy life, or you’d really rather not, in which case this thing’s going to be a complete buzzkill because it makes about as much sense as a rogue acid flashback.

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if, on the cutting room floor somewhere, not even accessible on the DVD, is a sequence featuring director Spike Jonze getting up and looking into the camera and saying “Okay, that’s it…everybody go home now.  And we’re TOTALLY not giving your money back.”

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives this preposterous series of unrelated events a two out of ten for showing up and not making a complete joke of itself–just about eighty percent of one.  Too dark and creepy for kids, too dull and pointless for grownups–Where The Wild Things Are needs to stay there.