Starring: Dylan Minnette, Jack Black, Odeya Rush, Ryan Lee & Amy Ryan
Directed by: Rob Letterman
Rating: ★★★½
When I say that I’ve waited all my life for a Goosebumps movie to be made- it’s not an over exaggeration. As a 90s kid, I was a massive fan of the Goosebumps books, and always wanted there to be a big budget movie.
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| Return of the Living Dummy... |
And now there is!
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| Stay out of the Graveyard! |
Released in the States last year, I was thoroughly disappointed that I had to wait four months to see Goosebumps on the big screen, as it was one of my most anticipated films of 2015. Now it has become my first review of 2016.
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| Monster madness! |
Was I excited to see it? Yes! Was I disappointed? A little bit. Did I still enjoy it? Of course!
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| How will they save the entire town? |
In true Goosebumpsstyle, the movie opens with a high schooler moving from the big city to a small town. Zach (Minnette) and his mother Gale (Ryan) make the angsty transition from the get go, and as soon as he moves into his new house (which, surprisingly, is not Dead House) he meets his new next door neighbour Hannah (Rush) and her weird father ‘Mr Shivers’ (Black), who warns him to stay away from his daughter- which of course he does not.
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| The |
After quite a bit of unnecessary exposition and teenage anxiety, the plot finally takes proper shape when Zach and his new friend Champ (Lee) break into Hannah’s house to rescue her from her father, only to discover that he is in fact R.L. Stine, author of the bestselling book series Goosebumps. They open one of his original manuscripts and, to their horror, unleash a Yeti onto the neighbour, which they can only capture by sucking it back into the book.
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| The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena. In Delaware. |
It’s a great idea, and is exactly the right move when making an homage to everything Goosebumps. Unfortunately, aside from a couple of in jokes that old fans like me would get, the film is played, for the most part, straight, and isn’t the campy pastiche it should have been. But I still enjoyed it.
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| Viewers beware your in for a scare... sort of. |
Although targeting a much younger demographic than I was expecting, there are genuinely funny and exciting moments which are supported by the eventual quick pace and constant action.
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| Don't Open the Soda Pop! Oh wait that was never a Goosebumps title... |
I chuckled to myself several times when the movie intentionally lampoons the book series’ fake-out ‘oh no I think someone’s trying to kill me- oh wait it was just a tree branch’ jump scares that ended every single chapter.
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| Stay off of the Ice! I'm getting good at these.... |
And even though the featured monsters are great, there aren’t enough of them. Sure, every single monster gets released into the world, but they just fade into the background, which I found strange and disappointing.
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| Assorted monsters that disappear halfway through the movie... |
Slappy the Dummy, evil lawn gnomes, a werewolf, zombies, a giant praying mantis and a Blob Monster all feature heavily, and are all great, but there should have been more iconic monsters in main roles such as Monster Blood, the Masked Mutant, the Haunted Mask and the Horrors from Horrorland.
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| Beware of the Frozen Food Aisle! |
Maybe they’ll be in the sequel.
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| The monster from A Shocker on Shock Street |
Regardless of this, I did actually enjoy Slappy being the main antagonist, which makes sense as his character spawned numerous sequels in the original book series, and he is pretty scary.
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| Revenge of the Living Dummy... |
Dylan Minnette is very strong in the lead role, and Ryan Lee is a likeable and funny comedy sidekick. Both of them have a lot of energy which make the film much more tense, amusing and enjoyable.
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| Stay Out of the Basement! |
Jack Black is a contained version of himself, and should have been campier in a role that could have been even more of a parod of his character's namesake.
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| Attack of the Graevyard Ghouls |
There is a big twist- of course- which readers of the original book series will see it coming a mile away- but it is cheesy enough to be great. The ending is fairly weak, apart from the cameo by the real R.L. Stine, as they decided to go for a happy ending- which was quite unsatisfactory- and then tag on a weird additional ‘twist’.
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| You Can't Scare Me- or can you? |
Clearly I wasn’t going to find the film scary, but I don’t think that the 8 year olds this film was targeted at would either. I think it should have had some real peril, been darker and much more kitsch, so that it would appeal more to the 90s kids like me who went to see a children’s movie just to relive their childhood.
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| Most definitely not One Day At Horrorland |
But although I’m being harsh on Goosebumps, only because I care, I still really enjoyed it. Even if it wasn’t a movie based on my favourite book series as a child it would still be an exciting, humorous action-adventure crammed full of monsters.
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| The Werewolf of Fever Swamp in a grocery store |
I wish Troy Steele of Blogger Beware, the authority on all things Goosebumps, would review this movie- he’d do a much better job than me- and he’d certainly be happy about the inclusion of the werewolf from The Werewolf of Fever Swamp.
There's a lot more I could say about the movie- I'm just still trying to process it all. I was so excited to see the film- and now I want to watch it again so I can properly take it all in!
It may not have been perfect- but it was still amazing to see my childhood memories up on the big screen!
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