The plot: While searching an abandoned house, Sonny (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and Sam (Caleel Harris) find a mysterious book with a lock on it that was apparently written by R. L. Stine. When they open it, they discover the ventriloquist dummy Slappy (Mick Wingert) who uses his magical powers to help the boys around the house... at first. It seems that Slappy is up to his old tricks, and he's planning to make this Halloween far scarier than anyone in the town would have expected, and it's up to Sonny, Sam and Sonny's sister Sarah (Madison Iseman) to stop him.
Taylor and Harris are basically playing tokens here, that
being the bullied nerd and the comic relief best friend respectively, and while
they do well enough to keep above the baseline, they still don’t make for
anything all that compelling to sit through. Then again, all three of them turn
out far better than Wendi McLendon-Covey as Sonny and Sarah’s mother, whose
performance is so wooden that she might even give some of the stiffer moments
from the original TV show a run for their money. Chris Parnell appears for a bit
and is largely wasted, Wingert as the voice of Slappy does okay with what
he’s given, and Ken Jeong as the next-door neighbour… ugh. Between the
typically grating performance and the equally irritating characterisation, it’s
not a good start when it becomes clear that this
is how the film views fans of the source material.
We’re dealing with Sony Pictures Animation once again, and
it’s certainly more of a mixed bag than we got the first time around. It’s not
so much that the animation quality itself is lesser, as it’s honestly about on
par with what we’ve seen from this studio before, but rather the range of
creativity in its use is lesser. There’s a couple of decent ideas being thrown
around, like the plastic Halloween decorations turning into real threats or the
scene where the leads are attacked by giant gummi bears, but for the most part,
we’re given pretty stock Halloween imagery to supposedly give us the willies.
Witches, ogres, a giant spider (made out of balloons, admittedly, but it’s far
less impressive than it sounds), not to mention the inclusion of figures like
Dracula; all that paper devoted to the works of R.L. Stine, and yet aside from
the more popular characters from the first film like the Abominable Snowman and
Slappy, there’s not much representation of that canon here. Because of this,
there’s this unfortunate generic sheen over a lot of the production, as if this
could’ve skated by without the Goosebumps name attached to it with little to no
real change.
Okay, tell a lie, there are
definite traces of Goosebumps to be found here; namely, that this is
essentially the same story as the first film in the most basic terms possible:
A ventriloquist dummy comes to life, he causes other things to come to life and
terrorise people, the heroes need a book to save everyone. The story here is
embarrassingly plain, sticking mainly to Slappy’s antics but the antics aren’t
even all that good. Watching a sentient puppet playing Rocket League with two
school kids isn’t exactly gripping material, but honestly, that might be the
out-of-the-box this film gets for any length of time.
I specified that this is the first film at its most basic
because there really isn’t anything else to it outside of rehashing the main
plot. Nothing that comes across as all that scary, even for Halloween horror,
nothing that ends up being all that funny, and nothing that gives this that
needed bite that made the original turn out so damn well. The closest we get to
that is with the brief reappearance
of Jack Black as R.L. Stine, and with only a combined five-minutes-tops of
screen time, he manages to bring more writerly titbits and honestly kind of
interesting ideas that anything else here. If the new characters had anything
interesting to them, or if the script kept with the original’s knack for paying
homage and lightly ribbing Stine’s works in turn, or even if it kept up with some of
the more metatextual touches, maybe the new, thin coat of paint on the same
idea could’ve sufficed. Then again, this is all coming from the writer who gave
us Peter Rabbit earlier this year; I can’t say I’m too surprised that his
characterisation isn’t exactly impressive. Or even all that watchable.
So, the comedy’s lame, the horror even more so, and the
story is just a shell of the film that this is trying to follow up from; is
there anything that this has going
for it? In the vaguest of senses, maybe, but it’s not as if the film takes time
to give some of the more miscellaneous parts of the narrative any staying
power. Like how Slappy’s plan banks on accessing a tower that used to belong to
Nikola Tesla, a bout of pointlessness that I’m sure will make the ghost of
Alexander Graham Bell quite happy. Or there’s the sudden motive for Slappy that
he needs a mother, in what might be the most half-arsed villain motivation I’ve
seen all year.
Then there’s the aforementioned high school melodrama, which
only barely passes on occasion due to including school bullies (which, cliched as
it is, is part of the Goosebumps
style) but largely feels like these people forgot who the demographic for these
films even were. Yeah, I’m an grown-ass adult writing that, so I get the irony,
but there’s appealing to a diverse audience and then there’s blindly trying to
grab onto anyone in attendance through sheer luck. Or there’s the most disheartening
part, the ending, which includes sequel-bait that feels like we’re being
tempted with the film we should have
gotten here, only I doubt even the potential in the idea presented is worth
bringing this series back for a third round. Especially if the people involved
can’t even be bothered to make it interesting.
All in all, this is an exceptionally blatant cash-in of a
sequel, only maintaining the barest minimum of what made the original work
while jettisoning all of the really interesting parts. The acting ranges from
passable to outright bad, the effects work shows a saddening lack of creativity
in bringing monsters to life, and the writing is so plain that only a scant few
minutes of Jack Black returning manage to outshine everything else in this
90-minute film. This is basically what I, and quite a few others, were worried
we’d end up getting with the first film, except that one showed more than
enough ingenuity and even some legitimate smarts to make it work. Here, it’s
just a shallow excuse for storytelling, one that makes me miss stories about
children being turned into chickens for being slightly rude. Like I said two
years ago, the Goosebumps stories aren’t all perfect, but man, do they deserve
better treatment than this.
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