Goosebumps Review- By Michael J. Carlisle

Title: Goosebumps
Year: 2015
Director: Rob Letterman
Country: US
Language: English

Goosebumps is a series of children's horror fiction novellas by author R.L Stine. Since the release of its first novel, Welcome to Dead House, in July 1992, the series has sold over 350 million books worldwide in 32 languages. The series has spawned a numerous amount of spinoff titles, a television series, merchandise and even a feature film. I had many of these books as a child and was always amused by each title. Would the film do the books justice? No.

A teenager (Dylan Minnette) teams up with the daughter  (Odeya Rush) of young adult horror author R. L. Stine (Jack Black) after the writer's imaginary demons are set free on the town of Madison, Delaware

The best part of Goosebumps is Jack Black's performance as R.L Stine, a creepy recluse of an author. He provides much of the comedy to this otherwise bland film. Why do I say it's "bland"? because the film doesn't know what it wants to be or who it wants to appeal to .Is it romance, drama, horror or comedy? Is it targeting the people who grew up on Goosebumps or is it targeting a new generation? Director Rob Letterman tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing nobody. 

The writing is tremendously bad. For a series that has so many characters and weird circumstances to play with, we are given a really dull "high school" movie full of the same old tropes we've seen dozens of times over. I didn't watch Goosebumps to see A Walk to Remember or Perks of Being a Wallflower. Aside from jump scares, there is no tension or dread. Aside from brief "destroy the city" cameos from the monsters, we don't get any personality. It's as if the writers didn't actually read the original material.

While the plot of the story is intriguing, it wasn't executed very well. It was extremely difficult not to fall asleep to this, or fast forward through the extremely dull moments. The film composer Danny Elfman wrote the score, but it just doesn't fit with everything else in the picture. Often there is dramatic music for the sake of dramatic music. Overall Goosebumps is very terrible, if I could un-watch it I would.