Very disappointing...

Lack of good storyline.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Just started watching these on Netflix after watching the movie with my two daughters. The TV show has some surprisingly strong moments and my 10 year-old finds it too scary. My 8 year-old, however, loves it.The stories are basically Twilight Zone episodes, with more ghosts and monsters. The biggest let-down is the acting. These kids all seem plucked from school drama classes rather than stage school and it really affects the execution and flow of the story. We've only watched a few episodes so far, but I noticed it particularly in Welcome To Camp Nightmare. There's a genuine escalation of weirdness, but Billy's reactions are so dull that it loses impact.Anyway, the premise of "beginning, middle and twist" is nicely done in each episode and that's what makes these stories enjoyable to watch.

I didn't grow up in the Nineties, I grew up in the 2000's (21st century). Unfortunately I'm eighteen and I get to be part of the cell phone texting, Family Guy-watching generation... damn, I do neither of those things but I'm so sick of seeing everyone around me doing it. My brother, sister and I aren't like kids from this generation, we're into super 8 cameras, B-movies and TV shows like Goosebumps. Goosebumps definitely isn't what I'd call scary at this time of my life, but it still has its moments.Goosebumps has episodes ranging in length; some are two-part episodes and go more like watching movies. Each episode has a different horror story for kids, but unlike adult horror shows like Tales from the Crypt or Tales from the Darkside, Goosebumps is aimed at audiences of kids and teenagers and many of the episodes feature life lessons. It has mostly comical episodes, and a few that are meant to be creepy. I think the single episode that managed to be remotely scary to me was my favorite episode, Welcome to Dead House, which featured a small town where a chemical factory accident killed all the residents, and they came back to life as mutant entities that were afraid of the sunlight and plotted to murder other families that moved in. It was surprisingly depressing and dark for a children's show, and had it been developed from the POV of the parents I could picture it as a full-length horror movie. It had this atmosphere that is hard to describe, dreary and industrial and unexpected in a show for kids.It's a Canadian show believe it or not, filmed in Toronto. Canada had its moments for having that dreary, dark atmosphere for horror (in the Atlantic side this country was home to the 1981 slasher film My Bloody Valentine, for example). Goosebumps had many episodes with amazing scenery for horror, and the actors, who were both Canadian and American, did an excellent job in most episodes. The series began to go bad in the last couple of seasons though, with funny but lame episodes like An Old Story that really pointed out that the series was about to end.Goosebumps is a great show for kids, no question about it. It's original, it's entertaining, and it's one of those shows you can sit back and watch after school or on a rainy day and escape into for a half-hour. I also recommend watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Haunting Hour, two other similar kids' horror shows that have even more to offer if you're into the more creepy side of these shows.

When I was a kid, I had a VHS tape that included a commerical for the Goosebumps videos. Earlier, I had no idea about Goosebumps except that it's scary and a show based on horror kids novels. I can't believe how that commerical fooled me and made me think that this actually worth watching. When I searched for it before, I took a road trip across all of my country's video stores and still didn't find it. I was going crazy because of this show; unfortunately, I turned my winter break into a disaster because I didn't find this show. I hardly found some books and read them and was totally impressed. But now and after watching various episodes, I finally discovered how stupid a show Goosebumps is. Even the books, now and after growing up, I found them to be poorly written and totally lame. The episodes I at least liked from this show were The Haunted Mask and Cry Of Cat Part One and Two; Neither than the bad acting and non-talented actors, I found these episodes to be well written. Neither then these episodes I give the show a BIG ZERO. Also about the special effects, did they buy them from a cheap store or something, they were totally unconvincing. Generally, I have nothing to say about this show except: lame, lame, and LAME.

Introduced to this show through a sibling who devoured R. L. Stine's books, I found I initially couldn't form my opinion of it since the first handful of episodes I saw happened to be based on the books I hadn't read (why is it the books you most want to read are the hardest to find?), but once I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to see ones based on the stories I'd read, my opinion was: the ones whose story counterparts I hadn't seen were decent on their own, but those based off of books I had were mediocre in comparison. All of them do seem pretty formula now in retrospect: an evil threatens but only the young protagonist realizes and has a difficult time making anyone else aware. The books are almost always formula in this point too - but Stine was phenomenal in spicing the stories up by conjuring up different humorous dialogue, explanations for the evil, or details to make it seem impressive to a kid. I found the books to be interesting but the show was never enough to scare even a 6-year-old, and I wondered why Stine was actually the host on this show rather than rejecting writers Billy Brown & Dan Angel and hunting for someone more faithful. The fact that (with a few exceptions that ran 2 episodes), each story was limited to less than 30 minutes (the commercial breaks which accounted for the "less than" were surrounded by fade-outs of some new terror arising - which, even the youngest viewer realized after a few breaks, would be a false alarm when it resumed) rushed the plots of stories I laughed and fascinated over in book form, giving no time to absorb the scares, other than the phony ones resolved in 60 seconds while the camera dimmed and returned. I appreciated significantly more those that ran 2 episodes for just under an hour, even with the fade-outs still causing boredom. The plots of these left on a cliffhanger after one episode and there was usually a better twist at the end. Also, since fewer action scenes were shown in most of the single-episode simpler stories, special effects were severely limited; I never found the antagonists as terrifying as they could be in imagination. Example: the book "Let's Get Invisible" doesn't instantly reveal who the being behind the mirror is, but the show has a dead giveaway as he wears a jersey with BACKWARD LETTERING - just plain cheesy! In the 3rd series, a large number of episodes were wasted not on books, but on short stories in his compilations Stories to Give You Goosebumps, which contained 10 boring stories (the one I tried and failed to read was the one never used to base TV scenes off of, but I'm sure the others were no better) which often provoked no fear even on the page - imagine how a screen adaption even weaker than their book basis would've been! No, the plot wasn't rushed; even worse - it was as though the while plot was shown but it was a rushed story to begin with! Ironically my favorite episode (along with a 3-part story I shouldn't mention; it wasn't based on a book) of which I've seen was one of these, "Click" - I doubt it was meant to be scary, but it did make me laugh expecting that the boy who exploited a space- and time-controlling remote could so easily be punished! I just wish I could punish the writers for such a weak adaptation, even to a kid, of a kid's favorite serial.