Goosebumps, an
energetic kid-friendly monster movie using R.L. Stein’s long-running series of
young reader horror books as inspiration, is the best Joe Dante movie Joe Dante
didn’t make. Sure, it doesn’t have his wicked satire (a la Small Soldiers or the Gremlins
movies), but it shares with his sensibilities an expression of movie love,
indebted to B-movie creature features and giddy with manic matinee action. It
finds a small Delaware town overrun with cartoony beasts ripped straight from
the pages of Stein’s books. That’s not just an expression in this case.
Screenwriters Darren Lemke, Scott Alexander, and Larry Laraszewski’s conceit is
that the author himself conjured these evil creatures with a magical
typewriter, trapping them within the pages of his manuscripts. When a series of
unfortunate accidents send his library fluttering to the wind, it’s a mad dash
to save the day. The author of these nightmares is the only one who can wrangle
them.
Jack Black plays Stein in a performance amusing for its oddball
stillness, projecting light gravitas from behind thick glasses and deliberate
movements. He clamps down his natural unrestrained comic charisma here, using a
theatrical clipped voice that’s Vincent Price adjacent, ending up projecting a
funny self-seriousness. I especially liked a running joke about his feelings of
inferiority to Stephen King. We meet him as a standoffish neighbor who glowers
at a teenager (Dylan Minnette) and his mom (Amy Ryan) who’ve just moved in next
door. The boy strikes up a flirtation with Stein’s daughter (Odeya Rush), who
we soon learn is forced to stay inside so as not to let her father’s dangerous
literary secret out. But of course the boy’s suspicious of this arrangement,
and totally crushing on the girl, so he calls a new nerdy friend (Ryan Lee) to
help him investigate. Then, of course, the aforementioned accidents lead to a
whole nutty chain of events and monsters everywhere.
As Stein and the teens scramble to make things right, the
town is destroyed in a carnival funhouse of light frights and sprightly action,
springing giggling good monster movie jumps and laughs with each new sequence.
Confrontations with werewolves, zombies, towering bugs, nasty gnomes, wicked
aliens, laser-wielding robots, an invisible boy, and more careen through a
progressively more battered downtown, eventually converging, as all
teen-centric films must, at the Big School Dance. Along the way, they encounter
inattentive and ineffective authority figures entirely unprepared to help in
such a strange situation. There are silly cops (Timothy Simons and Amanda Lund),
a goofy aunt (Jillian Bell), and doofus teachers (Ken Marino), an ensemble
fully stocked with ace comic character actors who are a little underutilized,
but at least don’t wear out their welcome.
Fast-paced and sometimes inventive, the action sequences make good use
of several typical horror movie locations: a locked house, an abandoned store,
a cemetery, a school. The speed to the incidents and slapstick approach to unreal violence cackles along, making this less a scary story, more a rollicking
adventure. A maniacal ventriloquist dummy named Slappy (voiced by Black,
twisting his speech into a Joker’s howl) leads the various beasties in an
attack on their creator, making for a fine villain to chase and flee, and
eventually confront in a satisfying climax. The characters remain thin types –
the hero, the tortured creator, the coward, the girl – but the quartet have
funny chemistry, and fly through the film’s mostly sturdy construction. They
hold their own against a flurry of effects and effectively staged stunts,
including some nifty flipped vehicles. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe makes
bright, colorful images dusted in a layer of mildly menacing atmosphere,
creating a pleasant fall chill to the sparkling fun, with Danny Elfman’s bouncy
score animating its gentle macabre spirit.
Director Rob Letterman, formerly of DreamWorks Animation,
keeps the movie hopping along nicely with a slick, smooth approach that makes
it all seem just the right kind of dangerous. It’s safe enough to be only fun,
but chaotic enough to get carried away with its light popcorn thrills. It’s
fast, funny, and enjoyable, pinned in only by its token emotional journey for
the lead boy, who gets a deeply weird romantic payoff, and a struggle with
grief that’s quickly dropped. Goosebumps is
too busy having fun with its horror mash-up to stop for such mushy stuff, I
guess. That’s just as well. It’s a fine evocation of the books (there are now
nearly 200 of them) that were all the rage when I was in elementary school and
continue to be popular amongst some kids these days, a movie mixing and
matching its monsters to find appealing kid-friendly action. It’s not millennial
nostalgia or children’s pap. It’s sweet crowd-pleasing entertainment with
cross-generational appeal, casually expressing a terrific and, oddly enough,
uncommon kid’s movie lesson: writing is great, reading is fun, and cultivating your
imagination saves the day.
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