Goosebumps movie too hair-raising for kids

Goosebumps delivers plenty of thrills—arguably in excess of its PG rating’s typical capacity for horror—but fails to achieve a campy greatness so easily within its reach. Casting swine before pearls, the screenplay designates too many of its humorous bits to the wrong characters.

A year after his father dies, Zach (Dylan Minnette) and his mother Gale (Amy Ryan) move to a new town, where she takes a job as the vice principal at Zach’s high school. In an extended set-up, Zach befriends Hannah (Odeya Rush), a homeschooled girl who lives next door with her father (Jack Black) in a large Victorian house with drawn shades. Hannah’s father turns out to be R. L. Stine, the best-selling author of the preteen horror-comedy book series, Goosebumps. (The real Goosebumps books by the real R. L. Stine, who makes a brief cameo in the movie, also spun off into a late ’90s TV show.)

Stine keeps each of his books, bearing titles like Night of the Living Dummy, under lock and key. When Zach unlocks a manuscript, a monster escapes from its pages. “That’s the abominable snowman, and it just crawled out of a book!” Zach’s friend Champ (Ryan Lee) exclaims. “I read what it did to Pasadena!”

A chain reaction ensues, orchestrated by Slappy (voiced by Black), a fiendish “living dummy” escapee with a Napoleon complex. “Tonight, all your children will come out to play,” Slappy snarls at Stine. Slappy then drives around town releasing the books’ scary creatures. He destroys the books so Stine can’t return the monsters to their tome homes. Stine, Zach, Hannah, and Champ must figure out a way to defeat the monsters before they completely demolish the town.

Goosebumps has its funny moments but wastes the comically gifted Black on bland dialogue. Champ is the film’s central comedy figure. Lee gives it the old high school try, but he’s no Jack Black. For humor, the film also banks on lame pick-up lines one of Gale’s concupiscent colleagues tosses her throughout the film.

Most disappointing is the underuse of a short, overzealous female rookie cop and her tall, Gomer Pyle-like training partner. Twice they bring a refreshingly offbeat vibe to a humdrum script, but they make an early exit thanks to an alien’s freeze-ray.

The film’s PG rating (for scary and intense creature action and images, and for some rude humor) is a bit puzzling. Humans don’t suffer physical violence, but the frightening images and scenes (like a vicious werewolf stalking a girl dressed in a low-cut party gown down an empty high school hallway) and many other shocking moments should give parents second thoughts about taking their young children to see Goosebumps.