Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Considering the success of R L Stine’s Goosebumps novels, which have sold in excess of 300 million copies worldwide, it seems strange that in an era of milking popular franchises for every last drop it has taken until now for a feature film to be released.
After all, the last proper Goosebumps novel came out in 1997, which poses its own problems. The children who gobbled up these spooky tales are now full-grown adults (as this writer would like to claim, even though his mother disagrees) and as for the new generation … well, the contents of the books are nowhere near as frightening as the prospect of actually picking up a book in the first place.
Luckily, the film adaption manages to spin a yarn that dollops up thrills, frights and humour in equal measure, while sprinkling just the right amount of nostalgia on top to appeal to the older fans. Director Rob Letterman has done a great job with the premise, it must be said. As the books are an anthology and each of the 62 in the canon have a different set of characters and monsters, there’s no real iconic protagonist or villain to latch on to.
So what we have here is Stine himself represented as the main character (although played by Jack Black), pitted against a host of his most popular monsters, creatures and quirky villains from the books.
The trouble begins when young Zach Cooper (Minnette) moves to a new town and immediately starts making googly eyes at next-door-neighbour Hannah Stine (Rush), R L’s daughter. As expected, Dad doesn’t want the teen heartthrob across the fence anywhere near his daughter, not only because of the protective dad impulses we’d expect, but because he has secrets in the house he’d like to keep under lock and key, literally.
Obviously, there’s no detracting two love-struck post-pubescents from their wishes, so they sneak out together and set off a chain of events that unleashes a swathe of monsters from Stine’s manuscripts. As it turns out, whatever he writes becomes real, and the only way to contain them is to lure them back into the pages and lock them up.
It’s a clever way of navigating what could have been a tricky obstacle, and the story is very enjoyable as it moves along at a breakneck pace. The film shines when the entertaining mixture of old-school practical creature effects and the more modern CGI creations run rampant across the town as the humans try to both escape and clean up the mess at the same time.
Slappy the ventriloquist dummy, arguably the most recognisable villain from the series, plays the lead baddie role, and he pulls the strings of flying vampire poodles, aliens with freeze guns, murderous lawn gnomes, mutant blobs, mummies, killer clowns, and a whole host of other creatures freshly sprung from their leather-bound jails.
It’s as mad as you’d expect, which is why Black is perfectly cast in the role. His shtick is well-known by now, and you’ll either love his acting style or it’ll grind your gears, but here he works perfectly as the imaginative author in too deep, and his eccentric ways provide for the film’s most humorous moments.
The younger cast shine too and we naturally become invested in their blossoming romance in the middle of the craziness going on around them. A revelatory twist later in the movie provides a surprisingly moving moment and the two have great chemistry.
My only major criticism is that the monsters just aren’t scary enough. Although the novels were aimed at children and never had any overt violence or threat, they built tension and mystery in an effective way. Here, the monsters are goofy and whacky, rarely threatening or chilling, and due to the nature of the medium, we know there’s going to be a happy resolution. Goosebumps is a fun ride from start to finish, mixing humour and an army of critters in a fast-paced thriller. Newcomers will find much to enjoy throughout, whereas fans of the series will have fun trying to remember and spot as many of the monsters as they can. Considering the train wreck this might have been in the hands of a less-capable director, perhaps the biggest fright of all is that this is actually very good.
