Review: Goosebumps

Goosebumps (PG)

USA 2015 105 mins Dir: Rob Letterman Cast: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush, Ryan Lee, Amy Ryan

A mainstay of nineties children’s fiction that was responsible for many formative horror memories (including this reviewer’s), the bestselling Goosebumps series expertly laced spine-tingling thrills with punchy plots characteristic of author R.L. Stine. Although they received a relatively short-lived TV incarnation, it’s perhaps surprising that Goosebumps has taken so long to reach the big screen; that the movie has finally arrived in the hands of Gulliver’s Travels director Rob Letterman is a cause for concern, but thankfully his take on this particular literary strand doesn’t commit the same level of heresy. In fact it’s solidly entertaining, if not especially scary (more on which, momentarily).

The movie reunites Letterman with Gulliver’s Travels star Jack Black, here playing a reclusive, Stine-like author with typical verve and gusto (plus a curious trans-Atlantic accent). The set-up is perfectly wrought in the manner of the original books: teenager Zach (Dylan Minnette) is a new arrival to a Delaware town with his mother Gale (Amy Ryan), the new vice-principal of the local school. When Zach falls for girl-next-door Hannah (Odeya Rush), he incurs the wrath of her father (the aforementioned Black) and, following a series of misunderstandings, unwittingly ends up unleashing a host of monsters from the latter’s collection of Goosebumps manuscripts (a self-referential angle that adds little to the storyline). Spearheaded by malevolent ventriloquist’s dummy and classic Goosebumps monster Slappy (voiced by Black), the likes of the abominable snowman and a host of devilish garden gnomes begin to take the town to pieces.

It’s all done with a degree of wide-eyed charm, broad strokes storytelling that’s acted with a degree of spry humour by a game cast. It’s interesting to note that movies such as this were once so prevalent, largely thanks to the efforts of suburbia-subverter Joe Dante, to whom the Goosebumps stories clearly owe a large debt; that the Goosebumps movie throws back to an era of Gremlins and Explorers during a time when bleak dystopian adventure is very much the young adult vibe feels pleasingly innocent and retro. Danny Elfman’s inventively exuberant score also feels like something of a homecoming, a return to the sweetly manic textures of blackly comic Tim Burton riot Beetlejuice.

And yet, whilst Letterman nails the knowing humour (bar some eye-rolling, obligatory references to twerking and Instagram), he struggles a bit more to convey a sense of menace. Certainly, in comparison to Dante’s underrated 2010 teen horror The Hole, a movie that packed in a serious amount of threat despite its 12A rating, Goosebumps feels relatively frivolous. Apart from the regular appearances of Slappy, whose eyebrow raising and diabolical cunning will have readers of the books positively gleeful, elsewhere it’s hard to find the threat in a giant CGI preying mantis or werewolf. The bloodless tone of the chaos that ensues doesn’t help: the Goosebumps stories weren’t afraid to get nasty when necessary and perhaps a bit more darkness to counter the laughs wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Even so the movie largely honours the fun tone of its source material, finding a sense of giddy exuberance in monsters of all shapes and sizes, which makes it a solidly worthwhile stroll down memory lane for fans and a blandly affable experience for newcomers. Anchored as ever by Black’s likeable presence (who makes a disposable gag involving werewolf saliva into something genuinely funny) and that of the younger players, it’s short on scares but high on likeability.

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