Such a frustrating disappointment

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Excellent, smart action film.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Zach (Dylan Minnette) and his Vice Principle mom Gale (Amy Ryan) move to Madison, Delaware next to the home of R.L. Stine (Jack Black). Through a series of mishaps, Stine's magical books are opened releasing all the monsters from his stories. Stine has a daughter Hannah (Odeya Rush) as our two teens are crushing on each other.Delightful film for the kids. You don't have to be familiar with the works of Stine to appreciate the film filled with puns and corny lines. The Elfman soundtrack incorporates riffs from the Harry Potter theme, but doesn't let them play too long.Rated PG, there is some monster intensity

I have to say that being British born and bred I'm not at all familiar with Goosebumps, either the books or TV series etc, so I was going into this film blind as it were. With that in mind I'm not really able to review to fans of the original works.I went in with the hope of a good time, I liked the sound of the concept, I like Jack Black and I knew it was going to be well produced and no doubt heavily laden with the latest technological effects (ironically I had watched the splendid Jason and the Argonauts prior to Goosebumps, from one extreme to another or what?!).I got everything I expected and had fun without any frame of reference. If I wanted any more I could dig out some questions that would need to be answered, but why bother. I left at the end, as a middle aged film lover, contented. I would for sure keenly watch any sequel if it surfaces.Didn't do much for my Automatonophobia though... 6.5/10

If you were a 90s kid like me well you'd probably have seen the TV show goosebumps. This show used to terrify me as a kid as I found the haunted mask and the dummy episodes scared me so much. Tim Burton wanted to do a film on the show but he turned it down and fast forward to 2015 and Rob Letterman directed a film on the show. Dylan Minnette plays Zach Cooper who moved into a new town along with his widowed mother.Zach notices a strange mam living next door with his daughter and Zach suspects that his a sociopath. Turns out the man is R. L Stine the author of goosebumps played by Jack Black.But when Zach and his school friend Champ sneak into R. L Stines house and accidentally summons a monster off one of R.L Stines books. This also has the evil dummy Slappy also voiced by black who escapes out of the book and summons all the monsters. But will R. L Stine and the gang be able to summon all the monsters back. Overall I thought this film was decent. Jack Black was great in this and the visuals were good. Just think of Jumamji meets Inkheart and you get this flick. The CGI was not too bad either. Too bad all the charcthers weren't in it e.g haunted mask. Good.

Ever since Empire gave this 4 stars, I've wanted to see this and finally bought it on DVD. My hopes started high, with some great comedy moments with Zach's try-hard aunt and the two inept cops. However, once the monsters are unleashed, the movie becomes entirely preoccupied with a race-against-time plot and those nuanced characters get hopelessly lost in lazy clichés. Everything in the script is too easy.MINOR SPOILERS: Zach meets a cute girl right next door and she's immediately into him. There's an improbably spectacular location introduced at the start, which you know is being set up for later in the film. The geeky sidekick gets to play hero to the most gorgeous girl in the school. And so on it goes. Worse still, the plot makes no sense in terms of how and why these monsters are unleashed in the first place.By the time the action gets going, it's as if the execs said "Don't bother will all that clever dialogue and character development - we just want a Gremlins/Small Soldiers type affair". The movie never stops long enough to give its characters breathing space, so the writer is forced to shoehorn in some truly cringe-inducing sentimentality.For all that, Goosebumps is a good fun ride, albeit with some sub-standard CGI. Enjoy it - just try not to think about it too hard.