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Goosebumps (2015) - Movie Review


Growing up, I was a huge fan of Goosebumps. I used to buy any Goosebumps book I got my hands on. I still have about twenty of them on my shelf. They were adventurous, often scary and creepy(at the time) and just plain fun to read. This movie gives a lot of nostalgia and kinda makes me go back and read the books again.

The plot isn't focused on a single book. Instead, the premise is that a family of single mother and an only child (Teenage Boy) moves to a new town and their neighbor happens to be R.L Stine, the author of the Goosebumps book. Due to a string of events, it turns out that opening the original manuscripts releases the monsters in the book to real life and now we have our movie. Comedy worked most of the times, monster sequences were campy but enjoyable and it was overall a pretty fun movie.

Story kinda played out like your typical Goosebump book. The main kid and girl were alright and Jack Black as R.L Stine was pretty fine, although having no resemblance to the author himself. The nerdy and scary character, champ, was really hilarious and carried most of the humor in the movie and was my favourite even though he sometimes got really annoying.

Slappy the dummy from 'The night of the living dummy' book acted as the main villain. And he was pretty great. Voiced nicely by Jack Black, which very much reminded me of Mark Hamill's joker. Snowman of Pasadena, Lawn Gnomes, Werewolf of fever swamp and giant praying mantis were some of the monsters that got focus and their own sequences in the movie.

The forced romance was cringe worthy though. The CGI could have been a LOT better. And it kinda sucked that only a handful of monsters were really shown. While the finale has tons of them, they were all in the background. Also, Slappy's arrival could have been a lot better if they implemented a chanting sequence, like in the books, in the movie.

Fun, family movie and a definite watch for the fans.

7/10
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