Choosing a single book from a list of highly popular bestsellers to make a mass-consumed, adventure-horror flick that teenagers would love to watch could be a daunting, tricky task. How does one decide that the monster in this book is better than the earlier one? How does one objectively make a creative decision to bring a giant snowman alive on screen but not a werewolf?
Tough call. It is not hard to imagine that Rob Letterman, the director of Goosebumps — which is actually a series of children’s horror-adventure books written by author R.L. Stine — along with the makers, faced a similar predicament. What did they do? They got every monster ever written by Stine into the movie.
Goosebumps is a standard children’s movie with a twist. The twist is that the film is actually a fictional biography of R.L. Stine, in which the monsters he created in his books have the ability to leap off the page and come to life. They dream up a plot in which author R.L. Stine plays himself, and the characters are so real that he has to trap them inside his books and lock them away. A high school teenager, Zack, breaks into Stine’s house with his mate, Champ, to look for Hannah, who has managed to catch his fancy. In the process, the two unlock the book, unleashing the most intelligent monster of them all — Slappy, the dummy.
What happens when the most intelligent, but spooky Slappy commands an army of monsters — giant garden bugs, zombies, werewolves and everything else — and vows to never get trapped inside the pages of a book, forms the basic idea of the film. In short, it is a highly sarcastic, self-referential film about teenagers, who whisper sweet nothings to each other, as they triumph over evil, peppered with a number of CGI-filled chase sequences. While some CGI-laced sequences — especially the climax – are straight out a B-movie, the stunt on a giant wheel, involving Zack, Hannah and Champ, belongs to a good children’s adventure film.
When the proceedings are sluggish, it is Jack Black’s performance as Stine that keeps the film going.
The film is more adventurous than spooky, more enjoyable than thrilling. .
