By Brett Blake GOOSEBUMPS is ostensibly an adaptation of the classic R.L. Stine series of books for young readers. The central conceit of the movie (a clever one), allows the story to not simply adapt a single entry in the book series, or to even combine several entries - rather, the film posits a world where the Goosebumps books exit, just as R.L. Stine is a well-known (though reclusive) author. In this world, Stine’s creations are able to take physical form and escape from the very manuscripts themselves, which Stine wrote to keep the monsters magically contained within the pages. This meta approach allows the filmmakers to essentially feature every Goosebumps monster ever conceived, and the result is a huge amount of fun arrive just in time for the Halloween season. As Stine, Jack Black plays the whole thing cranked up to 11, but it’s a very entertaining performance. As one might expect, he brings a great deal of humor to the film, but there are also some understated hints of real pathos, particularly in the way his relationship with his daughter, Hannah (Odeya Rush) unfolds over the course of the story. As our everyman hero, Zach, who moves in next door to the Stines with his mother, Dylan Minnette does solid and - at times - affable and charming work, and the chemistry he shares with the core cast - Black, Rush, Amy Ryan as his mother, and Ryan Lee as his new friend, Champ - propels the film. It would have been incredibly easy for any of these performers to take the obnoxious route - or far worse, to visibly condescend to the material - but there’s a genuine sense of good humor to all of them. Speaking of humor, it’s an undeniably funny movie, and not one that just panders to a kid audience. The dialogue is actually very sharp, and there’s nothing in here that would make adults cringe or hope for death. It’s all-ages family humor, and while this occasionally undercuts the tension at times (though, honestly, this is much more an adventure tale than a horror one), the laughs manage to give the movie a rather delightful energy. Danny Elfman contributes a vibrant score that would undoubtedly make for a fun listen on album, but it’s very much the sort of stuff we’ve heard from him before. We’ve got some crazy circus-esque music for Slappy (the ventriloquist dummy villain of the plot) which recalls Elfman’s BATMAN RETURNS score, we have some of the sweeping strings and frenetic brass of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and we have appearances by the classic B-movie staple, the theremin, which reminds a bit of MARS ATTACKS. Elfman’s score here is kind of a hodge-podge of ideas, but they fit the nature of the movie perfectly, and there’s probably nobody better at conjuring up the sound of playful and/or sinister mischief than he is. Director Rob Letterman handles the mayhem quite well, and he even adds some genuinely neat little visual touches, such as the embers of burning manuscripts filling the night air. The big climax is a certifiable embarrassment of riches, a literal monster mash of epic proportions that sees a horde of creatures of all shapes and sizes converging on our heroes. Fans of the Goosebumps books will certainly find a ton of Easter eggs hidden within this sequence, and even if the effects work sometimes borders on cartoonish, just seeing so many monsters wreaking havoc is really entertaining. The designs of the various hellish denizens walk the line between being truly unsettling and also being quirky in such a way that allows laughs to be generated by them without completely sanding off all the edges. The film stumbles a bit at the finale, squandering the possibility of a quite effective and even touching development in exchange for a more traditionally happy ending, but it’s a minor point, in any case. The movie just a big old romp that offers at least a tinge of the dark undercurrents that made the books so compulsively readable while also doing everything possible to satisfying the monster-hungry among the audience. GOOSEBUMPS is not a modern classic, but it has enough of a GREMLINSish flavor (which is probably the closest comparison to be made) to make it a worthy supernatural adventure, which is more than it probably should have been.
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