You want to talk nostalgic children’s horror franchises, you
can’t get far without encountering something relating to Goosebumps. The house
that R.L. Stine built, this over 20-year-old series was responsible for
introducing whole generations of kids to the things that go bump in the night,
either through the original novellas or the TV series. Well, not to go all Troy
Steele here, and I certainly don’t wish to ape that asshole in any way, but I
think the world has superglued its nostalgia goggles to its face when it comes
to this series. When news first hit that this film was being made, with these people attached to it, people were
already screaming “cop out”, “cash grab” and “BE-TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYAL!”. Yeah,
god forbid someone ruin the sanctity of stories where prune cookies turn people
into senior citizens or the psychotic mayor of a model town that taunts a
captive kid with a phantom baseball game.
Don’t get me wrong, I love these
stories for their own reasons and I’ll even admit that both the books and the
TV show could get legitimately scary at times like with The Haunted Mask and
even My Best Friend Is Invisible; hell, the latter was what first convinced me
to start up the now-dead Grey Vault review series because it still creeped me
out so much. I just don’t think it should be held as this impenetrable bastion
of quality in terms of family-friendly entertainment; this isn’t Avatar: The
Last Airbender we’re talking about here. So, with all that in mind, let’s take
a look at the film several years in the making. Readers beware, you’re in for a
scare.
