Goosebumps

Goosebumps is a lot better than it has any right to be. I expected another half-assed attempt to make a franchise out of something that at first glance doesn’t seem to be able to fit the blockbuster bill, but came away pleasantly surprised and hoping for another installment.

Based in part on the short novels by the same name, Goosebumps, (in real life and in the fictional world the film is set in), is a series of books that answer the question of what really does go bump in the night. Being an anthology series, the stories varied from book to book so for the big screen adaptation the filmmakers settled with focusing the film on a simple yet extremely fun concept: the monsters of Goosebumps fame have been accidentally unleashed on a small town to terrorize and destroy anything and anyone in their path. Led by a sadistic ventriloquist dummy named Slappy (but don’t call him a dummy) it’s up to a fictional version of Goosebumps author R.L. Stine (Jack Black), his young daughter Hannah (Odeya Rush), their recently moved in next door neighbor Zach Cooper (Dylan Minette) and his newly self-christened best friend Champ (Ryan Lee) to put Slappy and his menagerie of monsters back into their paper prisons for good.

While watching this film I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen most of it before. Now usually that’s a bad thing to say about a movie, but somehow the filmmakers manage to make it a blessing in disguise. The script does a good job of borrowing elements from a handful of similar films that mix well with the universe Goosebumps wants to build, never leaning on one idea too much and never taking itself too seriously.

Sucking monsters back into their books in a swirl of ink and energy? Sounds an awful lot like those nifty traps the Ghostbusters use. Fictional entities escape their prison to wreak havoc on the populace and the only people who can stop them are the ones who set them free? That has Jumanji written all over it. Interesting set pieces anchored by a simple and family friendly concept? Night at the Museum had that in spades. Point is, Goosebumps is really a sum of all of these parts and while said similarities give the movie an undeniable sense of fun and forward motion, they aren’t enough to give Goosebumps its own identity and thus a higher score.

Outside of the similarities to these films, Goosebumps doesn’t have much to throw into the mix on its own. The acting is solid all around if not a little underwhelming at times. Jack Black does a lot of the over the top work he’s known for, Dylan Minette anchors the film as a decent lead while Ryan Lee does a lot of the comical lifting when Black isn’t onscreen. As for Odeya Rush, she’s probably the weakest link here but still does an admiral job when the script calls for it, especially when a mid-film twist reveals an interesting wrinkle in regards to her character that I didn’t see coming.

All of this adds up to a pretty well put together film that had me smiling at the situations the characters were thrown into as much as it had me tense up at the minor scares the script conjured up. In the end this is a family film, but I commend the filmmakers for designing a movie that lends itself to being more than that. The emotional core of the film is actually quite touching if not a bit forced. Don’t get me wrong, an emotional core in a film is its lifeline but attempting to shoehorn it in at certain parts felt a bit off. It’s a welcome try but in the end those scenes didn’t feel earned, as they should have been.

On the other side of things, the special effects are acceptable, the set pieces are fun and interesting, the pace moves along at a quick clip, and the score (by the one and only Danny Elfman) is perfectly moody and whimsical at the same time. Basically this movie does almost everything right just not in the home run kind of way which one would hope for in a film like this.

Goosebumps might have taken the best ingredients from like-minded films of old, but they don’t mix quite as well as they should leading to a fun but ultimately middling movie experience.