Kids these days have it so easy. You see, back in my day, people didn’t make horror movies for seven year-olds, you just let seven year-olds watch actual horror movies and just hoped the future therapy bills would be minimal – but these days studios are happy to cough up wads of dough to make age-appropriate, spooky comedies that feature creatures of the night being threatening in a defiantly PG sort of way.
A great example was the surprisingly entertaining Goosebumps, a movie that took R.L. Stine’s Stephen King-for-kids series of books and essentially gave them the plot to Jumanji and chucked in a game Jack Black to preside over the chaos. However, it seemed a sequel was inevitable and before you knew it, Goosebumps 2 was banging on the door, crawling out of the grave or whatever colourful description you care to give it. However, the true horror of movies like this is that a lot of that earlier gumption, energy and the majority of the original cast has usually evaporated by the time a sequel rolls around. Can Goosebumps’ second coming rewrite the book on diminishing returns?
It’s Halloween in the New York town of Wardenclyffe and while some of the residents are going all out for the holiday, the Quinns find themselves distracted from all the crepe paper ghosts and plastic skeletons by other matters. While single mother Kathy toils in an old folks home, older daughter Sarah struggles to complete an essay for her college application and teenage son Sonny is trying to get a science project about Nikola Tesla finished while dodging school bullies. However, when Sonny’s excitable friend, Sam hits upon a money making idea that involves scavaging collectable junk out of abandoned houses (I’m sorry, what?), they make a find that makes their other problems fade into insignificance.
It seems the dilapidated house in question was once the childhood home of horror writer R.L. Stine and after discovering a secret panel, Sonny and Sam find an unfinished manuscript of the author entitled Haunted Halloween. Of course, no one knows that Stine’s writing has the unfortunate effect of making whatever lurks on the page leap out into the real world and after unlocking the book, malevolent ventriloquist dummy Slappy is once again free to wreak havoc on yet another unsuspecting town. But first, Slappy actually seems quite cordial as all the diabolical dummy wants is a family of his own, however, the moment he doesn’t get his own way, his true colours start to come out and he uses his funky, god-like, devil doll powers to start bringing all of Wardenclyffe’s Halloween decorations to life and have them terrorise the townsfolk while not actually managing to amass any kind of body count whatsoever – well, it is a kids film after all.
Can the kids figure out how to stop Slappy on their own? I mean, help is on the way in the form of a mystery guest, but it might take him a while to get there.
The first Goosebumps movie was actually quite a nice surprise as it presented a zippy script and snappy dialogue that mostly made up for the rather blatent fact that it simply was just Jumanji with monsters. Further strengthening that connection with the famous 90s franchise and it’s video game themed legacy sequels is that we also got a typically broad Jack Black performance as he played the perpetually uptight Stine. The jokes flew fast and the family friendly thrills flew faster and all in all, Goosebumps was a noticably above average example of its type with big, lush, production values. Of course, it’s probably to no one’s surprise that a follow-up came along a couple of years later, but it didn’t take too a long, deep look at the production to see that some sequel red flags had reared their heads like a werewolf howling at the moon. For a start, the original director, Rob Letterman, had vacated the directors chair in order to helm Detective Pikachu instead, leaving Ari Sandel, director of The Duff to take over. Elsewhere, more alarm bells are triggered when you realise that none of the original cast have returned and that almost includes Jack Black himself, who does actually resurface for around barely thirty seconds of the film as a surprise cameo. Weirdest of all, even though the movie also tips its had to some of the more central monsters from the first film – namely a werewolf in sweatpants, an Abominable Snowman and a couple of killer garden gnomes – are only given cursory nods but aren’t actually replaced with anything more memorable.
Yep, it seemed like the cash-in sequel checklist was getting everything single box ticked, but while Goosebumps 2 is a noticable step down from its predecessor and it makes some fairly obvious goofs, it actually isn’t half bad and has enough crammed in it to make it a fairly undemanding example of its kind. The first plus point is how much legitimacy that thirty seconds of Black actually buys and while it smacks of a clash of schedules (apparently two scripts existed; one with Stine included and one without), it does prevent the events here straying too far into random sequel territory. The other winning aspect is the fact that the movie gives a lot more screen time to Slappy as a much more hands on villain and even though he isn’t voiced by Black this time (there’s that scheduling snafu again), the guy who covers him by providing the doll’s vocals actually does an amazing job. From here, the film goes all out trying to cram as many monsters as it can into the rather tight time alloted and to be fair, most of them look pretty damn cool. While Slappy’s new ability to create new monsters without them crawling out of a haunted book seems pulled directly out of his wooden ass, the movie parades swamp monsters, mummies, glowing faced witches, flame necked headless horsemen and many more creatures besides.
However, this provides one of the movie’s main problems. We get so many varied creatures, none individually get a chance to shine much and most just get lost in the shuffle, but while some get their moment in the moonlight (killer gummi bears and a trio of sentient pumpkins garner genuine chuckles) others just seem like an unnecessary strain on the budget.
The other issue is that the main characters are such a collection of stereotypical fantasy movie characters, it’s actually painful to watch them work through their staggeringly boring arcs. No disrespect to the cast, but none of them could put an interesting spin on such overused tropes as the nerd brother, uptight sister trying for college, eccentric friend and uncool mom and it’s frankly a relief once Slappy takes the wheel fully, especially considering that Ken Jeong is also in this for some reason.
Admittedly fun and far better than it should be, Goosebumps 2 still suffers from feeling incredibly unnecessary and too short to allow some of its action to breathe. Also, proving my point even more is that it only came out a month after The House With A Clock In Its Walls, another fantasy family film that sees Jack Black fight weird magical shit while bellowing for all his worth. It has its moments, sure, but maybe it’s time to respectfully close the book on Goosebumps.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 