You won’t believe I liked this. I don’t believe I liked this. Would you believe this film, this stupid, second-rate, pre-pubescent, mock-horror based loosely on pages Harry Potter readers use for toilet paper, brought me to tears? No, I wouldn’t believe that, either. Personally, as vending machine tripe children’s literature goes, I’d sooner have expected great things from the Junie B. Jones series. But, fair is fair; I’d have trashed this film with gleeful exuberance if I’d hated it, so I gotta tell you why I did not.
Teenage Zach (Dylan Minnette) and mom (Amy Ryan) move to the middle of Delanowhere to start new lives. Mom is the new veep at Zach’s high school. Awkward. Perhaps he can last a week or two before somebody finds out. But hey! The chick next door, Hannah (Odeya Rush), is cute. And there’s her dad (Jack Black), who is … not cute. The “hi, dad!” meet and greet is met and gret with outright hostility: “see the fence? Stay on your side.”
Do you want to know what makes a good film good? I mean, do you really want to know? The basic plot here is that dad is reclusive Goosebumps (Gersberms?) author R.L. Stine, and his monstrous creations can be brought to life if the original drafts are unlocked – so naturally Zach pulls a b&e to investigate and unlocks the puppet of death or whatever. Yeah, yeah, it’s silly. What makes a good movie good is that before this happens, Zach has to be interested enough in Hannah to want to investigate when he thinks Hannah is screaming. In a lesser film, this is accomplished with one smile and a guy turning to his idiot friend and saying, “whoa.” In Goosebumps, Hannah hops a fence, sneaks up and startles Zach, forces odd-but-pleasant conversation and then at his prompt, leads him to one of her favorite places – a nearby woods, where an Eric Cartman switch (“PARTY ON/PARTY OFF”) reveals an undersized, abandoned, ivy-covered carnival. Hannah leads Zach to scale the stationary ferris wheel to a car above the tree line with a view of the town and the stars. And in a horror film aimed at encouraging young readers not to give up, there is, 
magically, one of the highlights of the romantic year in film. What makes a good film good? The understanding that, yes, an adventure film works better if it includes a quality romantic element.
So, yes, I can see that Zach would indeed be concerned when he hears Hannah scream from next door at the hands of her possibly abusive father. This coup allows us first to introduce the idiot police force, then pull in the dorky friend, Champ, yes “Champ” (Ryan Lee), then the bear traps (?) in Jack Black’s basement, and finally, Pandora’s stacks.
There was much to enjoy in Goosebumps – I dug when the wimpy kid fends off a werewolf with a bite of his own – his fillings are silver, you see. As when the same kid insists upon a selfie with the semi-famous author while their car is fleeing recklessly to escape a 50-foot tall praying mantis. Gersberms enthersiests will enjoy the screen embodiment of all their favorite tale … or should, at least. Can’t say the monsters were especially unique, except for, perhaps, the evil garden gnomes – I mean, sure, I always considered those guys a little slice of Hell, but I’d never actually thought them evil. Come to think of it, maybe I did. No matter.
The set-up of this film should look familiar – Gremlins and Jumanji immediately come to mind. The creatures get out, terrorize the town, cops are useless, gotta figure out how to stop ‘em, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not a bad formula, and it certainly works in the pre-pubescent horror format. The one part that disturbed me was why we insisted on a real portrayal of R.L. Stine; is the film implying these tales are non-fiction or autobiographical? This is clearly not the case. The ending was too short and too pat –how could you not know how to stop the monsters? You wrote the books; did they all end with a monster living happily while terrorizing a town?—however, the ending allowed for a sentimentality that I would have scorned had the ferris wheel scene not existed. Funny how that works.
Fleeing mummies, aliens and evil germs
“All creations of mine,” he confirms
Stine’s scripted milieu
Needs dismissive adieu
A noble conclusion gives me gersberms!
Rated PG, 103 Minutes
D: Rob Letterman
W: Darren Lemke
Genre: Pre-horror
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Fans of the books, I imagine
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: People who need their horror on the more graphic side
