GOOSEBUMPS 2: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN – Review

Witches, werewolves, creatures, spiders, mummies, pumpkins… Halloween is always a colorful combination of characters and frightful findings. The same can be said about R.L. Stine’s popular Goosebumps book series. Given the number of books he’s written over the years, it’s no wonder that the 2015 film decided to take an ensemble approach to the author’s creations instead of adapting just one story. The meta-approach to bringing the stories to the big-screen while acknowledging the author’s popularity within the film resulted in tongue-in-cheek family fun. GOOSEBUMPS 2: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN takes a very similar approach but sets it during… you guessed it. Now, you have a film made up of Halloween, Goosebumps characters, self-aware humor, and even Nikola Tesla (yes, the famous inventor). While the combination should work on paper, these ingredients come together into a concoction that’s never as sweet or fun as the first entry.

Besides Jack Black reprising his role as famous horror writer R.L. Stine – in what feels like a stint filmed over the course of a weekend – we’re treated (or tricked, depending on how you look at it) to a whole new family-friendly cast of characters in a new setting. Sonny and Sam (Jeremy Ray Taylor and Caleel Harris) discover a hidden room with a chest when they are scavenging in an abandoned home. Inside the chest, they discover a locked book titled Haunted Halloween. When they open it, they flip through it and realize it’s unfinished. What they initially don’t realize is that they also resurrected Slappy the ventriloquist dummy. It’s now up to the two friends and Sonny’s sister Sarah (Madison Iseman) to stop Slappy from bringing Halloween characters to life and destroying their town.

R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps book series is one of the reasons why I’m the horror fan I am today. There are other films, books, and tv shows that formed the macabre mind I have today, but Goosebumps was one of the first. Even though I went into the 2015 film adaptation with apprehension, I left feeling that GOOSEBUMPS perfectly captured the tone of Stine’s children’s stories while incorporating a clever conceit so that all of the writer’s creations can emerge on-screen.

Director Ari Sandel has a hard time finding his footing taking over for Rob Letterman. The jokes don’t land quite right, the scale of it all seems smaller and cheaper than it should (similar to the TV show), and the film bounces between scenes somewhat sporadically, feeling as if it doesn’t quite know what it’s doing. Granted, some of the blame can be put on the script by Darren Lemke. Once the film turns into Slappy’s show, the characters serve more as conduits to explain the plot instead of genuine and goofy kids. They “randomly” stumble upon R.L. Stine’s name when researching weird paranormal events online. Next, they suddenly know how to use the book to beat the demons. And of course, they know Slappy will use Tesla’s coil to bring everything to life. A number of plot points are clumsily shoe-horned into the dialogue to push the film from one visual gag to the next.

GOOSEBUMPS 2 isn’t without a few fun and scary moments that page-turning fans will appreciate. Like the garden gnome scene in the first film, the gummy bear setpiece makes for a gooey treat as the little guys morph into one another to create a larger demon bear. And, of course, there’s the fan-favorite Slappy. While he wears out his welcome on screen, his introduction in the spooky old house is the perfect example of a less-is-more style of scare, free of the CGI to come. By the time he’s raising an army of monsters in a department store, you get the feeling that the screenwriter might have mashed two film ideas together: a Slappy spin-off film and a remake of the first film.

It’s trying to be a love letter to the season of Halloween (complete with a HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH visual nod). It’s trying to be a creepy doll film. It’s trying to be a fun family film. It’s trying to be a “Goosebumps Greatest Hits” creature feature. It even feels like it’s trying to be an anti-bullying PSA in the first half with a number of drawn-out scenes. GOOSEBUMPS 2: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN wants to be all this and more, but it can’t quite achieve any of these as it lives in the monster-sized shadow of its predecessor.

Overall score: 2 out of 5

GOOSEBUMPS 2: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN opens in theaters everywhere Friday, October 12th, 2018