A teenager teams up with the daughter of young adult horror author R.L. Stine after the writer's imaginary demons are set free on the town of Madison, Delaware.
Director: Rob Letterman
Stars: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush
Storyline
Upset about moving from a big city to a small town, teenager Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette) finds a silver lining when he meets the beautiful girl, Hannah (Odeya Rush), living right next door. But every silver lining has a cloud, and Zach's comes when he learns that Hannah has a mysterious dad who is revealed to be R. L. Stine (Jack Black), the author of the bestselling Goosebumps series. It turns out that there is a reason why Stine is so strange... he is a prisoner of his own imagination - the monsters that his books made famous are real, and Stine protects his readers by keeping them locked up in their books. When Zach unintentionally unleashes the monsters from their manuscripts and they begin to terrorize the town, it's suddenly up to Stine, Zach, Hannah, and Zach's friend Champ (Ryan Lee) to get all of them back in the books where they belong.
Goosebumps Reviews
"Stephen King is no slouch," commented a member of the Movie Fan Facebook Page staff. The man has published 60 books, which have sold over 350 million copies. "Wait a minute," you say. "Why start a review of a movie based on R.L. Stine's books by talking about Stephen King?" Fair question. Well, Stine has been called "the Stephen King of children's literature." Beyond that, you may be surprised to learn that Stine has bested the famously prolific King by publishing hundreds of books, which have sold over 400 million copies! Think about that. It's enough to… give you goose bumps. That, of course, is the name of Stine's most popular series of books, brought to the big screen in the film "Goosebumps" (PG, 1:43).
Fans of the series may wonder which of the books is the basis for the movie. The answer is none of them – and all of them. Rather than adapting any one of Stine's books, which are, admittedly, relatively short (as Stephen King exclaims, "Ah-HAH! See?"), this film imagines a world in which Stine's monsters come to life and terrorize a small town, while R.L. Stein himself, along with a few local teenagers, attempt to recapture the creatures and save the town. I won't spoil the movie, except to say that, in the end, we Movie Fans get a film that is as exciting and delightful as any of the books that inspired this story.
The film has Jack Black portraying Stine as an unfriendly recluse in the tiny (fictional) town of Madison, Delaware. Showing Stine as a movie character which we get to know as a man, but is only a fictionalized version of the real person recalls movies like Charlie Kaufman's 1999 fantasy comedy-drama "Being John Malkovich" or Matthew LeBlanc (starting in 2011) playing himself as an adorable jerk in the Showtime comedy series "Episodes". Black's Stine calls himself Mr. Shivers. He's a widower who lives in a big house with his kind, but mischievous 16-year-old daughter, Hannah (Odeya Rush), whom he homeschools.
Moving in right next door is Madison High School's new assistant principal, recently widowed Gale Cooper (Amy Ryan), and her teenage son, Zach (Dylan Minnette), still grieving the loss of his father. Gale's sweetly clueless sister, Loraine (Jillian Bell) greets them with open arms, but Zach and Gale simply have a lot of adjusting to do – and new people to meet. Gale is almost immediately hit on by shy fellow educator, Coach Carr (Ken Marino), while an awkward nerd ironically named Champ (Ryan Lee) traps the new guy into a friendship. It's a good thing for Zach that Hannah is such a pleasure to be around.
One night when Zach looks towards his new neighbor's house and thinks he sees Mr. Shivers abusing Hannah, he calls Champ and they steal into the house. Zach and Champ see that Hannah's okay, but not before they find a key and open a locked "Goosebumps" manuscript among many on a shelf in Mr. Shivers' study. The book is "The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena" and unlocking the manuscript allows a large, furry creature to literally jump off the page. The three teens run after him, Hannah telling them that the monster can only be re-captured by sucking him back into the book from whence he came. The Abominable Snowman wreaks havoc on the town until Mr. Shivers shows up to save the day.
