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Home Reviews Film Review

Goosebumps (2015)

Olly Buxton by Olly Buxton
February 4, 2016
in Film Review
Goosebumps (2015)
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R. L. Stine, who sounds like a pseudonym borne of a pun, published “Goosebumps”, a series of something like 60 young adult horror stories in the nineties. For all their 350 million worldwide sales, their target market missed this reviewer by a distance. They are generic chillers: werewolves, reanimated gnomes, possessed ventriloquist dummies, zombies, evil clowns, giant locusts – you know, the sorts of things that populate Stephen King’s back catalogue – written tightly into a formula: beginning, middle and TWIST.

Rob Letterman (Gulliver’s Travels) has again co-opted Jack Black and Sony Pictures Animation to create a kind of meta-goosebumps story – not a dramatisation of an R. L. Stine tale itself, but one about the stories, in which we meet all of them. At once.

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In a leisurely opening act we meet our protagonists. Zach (Dylan Minnette) is the new kid in town, recently bereaved of his father he has arrived with his mother to start a new life. He mucks in with Champ (Ryan Lee), a buck-toothed, wisecracking buddy from school, pretty girl next door Hannah (Odeya Rush), whose profoundly uptight old man, Mr Stine (Black) instantly warns Zach to keep his feet off a property he’s not standing on, and his hands off a daughter he hasn’t touched.

But Hannah has other ideas. Nor does Zach, a red-blooded 16 year-old, need much persuading. Before long a story unfolds, courtesy of passable chemistry between Minnette and Rush and dramatic tension from Black, who is pleasingly weird but manages not to explode (as he so often does). After a couple of decent jump-scares Zach and Champ find themselves deep inside Stine’s house looking to rescue what they have concluded is a damsel in distress.

Then Letterman puts his foot down. Monsters: it being R. L. Stine’s library, there are any number of them.

The device by which we meet R. L. Stine’s menagerie is clever, but it flat-out torpedoes the burgeoning coming-of-age melodrama. The lovebirds (and Champ) are suddenly confronted by a Yeti. From there things quickly – well, they snowball. Stine’s creatures leap from the page – literally – cuing pan-directional mayhem. As convention dictates it is the children’s job to get them back in the pen.

Here Letterman abandons his nascent character arcs and hands the steering wheel to the special effects guys. In a stroke, three kids with a manageable problem are facing zombie dawn, attack of the fifty-foot grasshopper, some aliens with a freeze-ray and a ventriloquist’s dummy with father-issues.

That’s a shame. Even ten years after Matrix Revolutions took digital wizardry to its pointless logical conclusion, animation studios still can’t help throwing in the kitchen sink. But, as Nigel Tufnel would say, once you’re at ten all the way up, where can you go?

Secondly, if you blow the budget at the end of Act I, however spectacular it may seem, your Armageddon has to be, functionally, a little half-baked. How else can there still be a story to tell? You can’t wipe out the good guys, since you need them for the last act. Thus we are treated to the unedifying spectacle of a werewolf haplessly chasing teenagers around a supermarket, but never quite catching them. Outside, a giant praying mantis lays waste to the countryside but can’t lay a finger (well, proboscis) on the dramatis personae. Nor can the Abominable Snowman, nor the Gnomes, and the zombies are just hopeless.

This is the curse of CGI. The story arc gets blown to smithereens by the overwhelming temptation to show off.

It isn’t all bad by any means. Jack Black is just the kind of big personality Letterman needs to stand out against that kind of mayhem. The three young leads never get buried. The picture never loses its wit. But the payoff, as surely it must be (for how are three kids meant to close Pandora’s Box?) is preposterous. So is the attempt to undo one of Stine’s famous twists to restore the necessary happy ending. But that hardly matters. It’s an entertaining hour and a half: This is no E.T., or Labyrinth, much less a Princess Bride, but it will keep the youngsters quiet.

You can get Goosebumps in cinemas from 5th February.

Director: Rob Letterman
Stars: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush, Amy Ryan, Ryan Lee, Jillian Bell
Country: USA
Running Time: 103m

Film Rating: ★★★½☆

Tags: Amy RyanDylan MinnetteGoosebumpsjack blackJillian BellOdeya RushR. L. StineRob Lettermanryan lee
Olly Buxton

Olly Buxton

Olly lives amongst the lush olive groves and cypress trees on the slopes of Mount Muswell, just north of London, where he has a thirty five acre lifestyle orchard and farm with lifetime partner Bridget and their small ('but growing!') herd of alpacas. When he's not darting around the corniches of Hamstead and Highgate on his convertible BSA motorcycle ('it's more of a cabriolet, really') or tasting his latest batch of extra virgin oil with the orchard's head oliculturalist, Ned, Olly researches for his forthcoming novel, a science fiction fantasy in which, courtesy of a time machine, it is David Bowie and not namesake Jim who is left to defend the Alamo from the siege of the Mexican Army. A committed Radical Marxist Ironist, Olly made his fortune during the world-wide anti-capitalist riots of 1999 on the back of the simple but ingenious idea: selling packed lunches and bottles of diet coke to hungry protesters at a huge mark-up. "FeedtheCommie.com", as he styled his fledgling business, quickly became an enormously profitable multinational operation, quenching thirsts and filling bellies of protesters, dissidents, exiles and other militant intellectuals during times of civil unrest and civil protest in thirty six countries around the globe, from its headquarters in Seattle. The company also secured lucrative sponsorship deals with (among others) Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the Socialist Workers' Party. Olly then consolidated his net worth by securitising the income streams from FeedtheCommie.Com, negotiating a successful IPO and selling his entire holding ('mostly to student Marxist Radicals I had befriended, I would point out') at the top of the market. As of its public debut, FeedtheCommie.com is yet to make any revenue and is currently trading at 6 per cent of its par value. Nevertheless, Olly doesn't feel too bad about the sub-class of bankrupt Marxists he has created. "It's what they would have wanted". Now the second richest man in the world, Olly has settled into a life of writing political philosophy, voyaging on journeys of self discovery ('I find something new about myself every day. This morning it was dandruff'), and ceramic painting (pointillism).

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