View Poll Results: GOOSEBUMPS

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Thread: Goosebumps (Rob Letterman)

  1. #1
    In the belly of a whale Henry Gale's Avatar
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    Goosebumps (Rob Letterman)


  2. #2
    In the belly of a whale Henry Gale's Avatar
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    Pretty decent in a very low-stakes way. The fairly terrible trailers put me off from most of the promise the awesome logline of the haunted manuscripts letting all of Stine's monsters loose in a town originally gave me, so I was pretty enthused when the first few minutes started with neon green opening titles, the logo became that oozy, drippy typeface, and the first interactions between Amy Ryan and Dylan Minnette's characters captured a surprisingly charming and even edgy rapport between the two. Then the stuff immediately afterwards provided that same sort of off-kilter but wholesome balance with scenes of awkward family dynamics, youthful exploration and underlying melancholy that I've always loved, but have never felt as prominent since kids movies of the '80s and '90s. It was set to be a pretty great movie about adolescence that didn't beg to ever have one non-human character in it.

    So once the action kicks off, it's a bit of a shame so much of those actual monster-y hijinks involve fairly weightless and dodgily CG animated creatures in pursuit of the characters with very PG-rated danger to them potentially being caught. We know that no one's going to die if they catch up to them, but even accepting that, it feels like a lot of that middle act chase stuff could have been a lot more inventive, especially considering the endless possibilities of monsters from Stine's canon. There are basically two types of monsters in this movie: The practical ones (which often look pretty on-point, with the slight exception of Slappy who I really think should've had the horrifically creepy eyes from his original cover, instead of just looking like a Jimmy Carr puppet) and then the significantly more generic-looking, sound-effects-heavy CG ones which did very little for me, but of course carry most of the major setpieces.

    BUT THEN the last act is when it more or less makes good on a lot of its early and premise-based promises though, turning everything essentially into the finale of Cabin In The Woods: For Kidz! (with a weirdly large bunch of World's End / Shaun of the Dead vibes too, though obviously sanitized and vague similarities). Perhaps I was wrong to want a little more of the pulpy weirdness of great younger-skewing movies from decades past that managed sneak in a lot of fantastically ostentatious moments that are gloriously bizarre that you can't believe were ever there when you revisit them, since as a big-budget studio movie in 2015, it's safe to say this wasn't going provide any of that, or even anything resembling the deeply terrified but enthralled effect the original "Haunted Mask" two-part premiere of the Goosebumps TV series had on me when I was 5 years old.

    There's little nightmare fuel here (boooo), and the oddly Harry Potter-looking marketing designs in its posters (other than the properly autumnal forest-y one I posted above that actually resembles setpieces from it) give a sense of the sort of audience they're going after, and it's weird how often it reminded me of things like Fright Night (both the old and new) or Monster Squad without ever really digging into that ethereal eeriness and frustrating helplessness of kids from the adults around them that those movies or the '90s Goosebumps series captured. But who knows, maybe this will generationally become some current kids' version of the show, Monster Squad or even a Goonies or Hook in terms of something that strikes an unexpected chord that becomes something they'll look at fondly at, especially as a Hocus Pocus-esque Halloween staple. I mean, my own nostalgia for the books and the TV show got me into the theatre (and I got the added treat of having R.L. Stine maybe eight feet in front of me at our screening as a result), and though the movie didn't do a ton to tickle that yearning for a modern version of the same, it still managed to carve out a lot of solid, if standard-feeling, entertainment to stand on its own (with a fun Danny Elfman score to boot). It's many tiers below, say, Monster House or ParaNorman, but it's still its own little spunky thing when it wants to be.

    **1/2 / *** or 6.4-ish out of 10
    Last edited by Henry Gale; 10-13-2015 at 07:05 PM.
    Last 11 things I really enjoyed:

    Speed Racer (Wachowski/Wachowski, 2008)
    Safe (Haynes, 1995)
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    Beastie Boys Story (Jonze, 2020)
    Bad Trip (Sakurai, 2020)
    What's Up Doc? (Bogdanovich, 1972)
    Diva (Beineix, 1981)
    Delicatessen (Caro/Jeunet, 1991)
    The Hunger (Scott, 1983)
    Pineapple Express (Green, 2008)
    Chungking Express (Wong, 1994)

  3. #3
    White Tiger Field Stay Puft's Avatar
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    I was bored and decided to finally give this a look, and I'm sorry to say, but the bumps did not goose me.
    Giving up in 2020. Who cares.

    maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (Sky Hopinka) ***½
    Without Remorse (Stefano Sollima) *½
    The Marksman (Robert Lorenz) **
    Beckett (Ferdinando Cito Filomarino) *½
    Night Hunter (David Raymond) *

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