Rating: *** out of 5 stars

Thrills, chills, and lots of fun are what you expect when you read the Goosebumps series. The movie is based on the books series Goosebumps written by R.L. Stine. Goosebumps is a movie directed toward children, just as the series is intended to. Although this movie was made for children, the genre is horror and is meant to be a bit scary, even though most agree after watching the movie that the books turned out scarier than the movie.

The story is mainly about a mother and her son , Zach, who move from uptown New York to a sleepy, small, rural town. Zach complains but because of his recent loss and the job opportunity for his mother he was stuck to endure the the new change. As the family unpacks Zach notices his new neighbors Hannah and her dad . These characters play a crucial role in the story, as well as the friend Champ he meets later on his first day of school. The trouble starts on the night of Zach’s first school dance, and that’s when the adventures begin. The unlikely crew end up together to try to save the day. The movie consists of many monsters from the books,comedy, some twists and turns, and even the real R.L. Stein himself ends up in the movie. The movie wasn’t very scary, at least compared to the books, but the movie was made for children.

There were five main characters; Jack Black as the father of Hannah, Dylan Minnette as Zach, Odeya Rush as Hannah, Rylan Lee as champ, and Amy Ryan  as Gale or mother of Zach. The  characters did pretty well with their parts but I was most disappointed with the critic acclaimed and most famous actor Jack Black. Although the film was meant to have some funny parts it was a mostly serious movie, especially the part Black had to play, but in all honestly I thought Black couldn’t pull off such a serious strict like figure, so during the movie I couldn’t take him seriously. Also I think Jack Black’s voice is so iconic that he shouldn’t of voiced some of the monsters in the film, because it was so obvious that it was him. But I thought the rest of the actors played their part well even though most of the parts they were expected to play where a little cheesy and unoriginal, for example I thought Rylan Lee did an amazing job of playing Champ but Champ was such a cheesy character, he was supposed to be that dorky quirky friend. But over all the cast worked together to make a okay acting job.

The movie was all right. I enjoyed the actors for the most part, but there were a few things that I didn’t like. The soundtrack was not the original Goosebumps soundtrack but it may be that they didn’t have the rights, even though it seemed like the it was a high end movie. Also, it was a bit annoying that the entire movie was a giant chase scene. During the movie there was poor character development which made it hard to connect with the actors, there was just not a lot of growth for any of the characters on this whole wild chase.

Also,the plot was not clearly explained, especially the important details which made it confusing, and the scenes were choppy and the flow of the story was not smooth.If you read the books you would see that the movie did not follow the plot lines and left key portions of some of the storylines. Another thing that I thought they could add to the movie was more of a diversity of Monsters, there was like a main three that they focused on even though R.L Stine has so many more creatures that he created.

Another thing that kind of annoyed me was that it seemed like they thought they had to include a teen romance story along with it, so they just kind of put it in there resulting in it being stupid and kind of Romeo and Juliet like, just falling in love after a couple hours.

Overall the movie had a rushed feeling, it was like they had this good ideas of bringing back goosebumps but they just wanted to get it done and not focus on the actual story. I ended up being disappointed because I suspected more,  especially because of how amazing the cast and crew was. But then I had to remember that it is just a children’s movie so it shouldn’t be put up to that harsh of an opinion, and in that sense it really wasn’t that bad.

The lessons,  morals or themes that the movie worked to teach the audience where that don’t shut people out, remember to grow as a person, and always trust in your friends. I think Goosebumps did a good job portraying those overall.

The movie was PG and I would recommend it to children of age 6-11 and I even think older kids, or maybe even older people in general would even like to see it, to reminisce in the times when Goosebumps was read. But I would not recommend this to someone who has read the books and would be critical of the movie and suspect the movie to be super similar to the books.

In conclusion I would say that this movie is okay, especially considering it is a children’s movie.