Review: Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018)

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018)

Rated PG for scary creature action and images, some thematic elements, rude humor and language

Score: 2 out of 5

To repeat what I said in my review of the first Goosebumps movie from back in 2015, that movie should've sucked. Every single thing about it before its release pointed to a disaster in the making, from the casting to the marketing to the license. And yet, while it wasn't a great film, it was entertaining, well-made, and felt like it had some genuine heart put into it, such that I can imagine it sticking around as a nostalgic cult classic just like the books that inspired it. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, on the other hand, is closer to the movie I was fearing. Again, it's too well-made to be a downright bad movie, and it kept me at least mildly amused for its entire runtime. But on the whole, it felt like a cheap studio cash-in on the success of the first film, between how it recycled its predecessor's villain and plot and how it actually had a much smaller budget this time around. It was clear watching this that its failures weren't the result of apathy; many of the people involved in its production cared about the final product, going by the quality of the effects work, the talented cast, and the numerous gags that do successfully land, such that the film can almost fool you into thinking it's good. But the script felt like it had gone through a dozen rewrites with a dozen uncredited writers, with subplots piled on top of subplots that don't go anywhere and seem designed more to keep up with the attention spans of toddlers than to tell a coherent narrative, and then chopped up even further in the editing room. This film does have quite a few good ideas buried in it, but that's just the thing, they're buried under so much fluff that they suffocate. Talk about a frustrating movie.

The plot once again concerns Slappy, the evil ventriloquist's dummy that serves as the Goosebumps series' unofficial mascot, a PG-rated version of Chucky from Child's Play. I can get right into the problems I had with this film, especially compared to the first one, just by talking about the plot. At first, we get what seems to be a much smaller-scale story than the grandiose adventure of the first film; instead of a litany of classic (and not-so-classic) Goosebumps monsters stomping around a small town, we'd basically get a film adaptation of one of the Night of the Living Dummy books, in which Slappy attempts to take over the lives of a group of adolescents and make them his slaves after they accidentally release him from a long-lost R. L. Stine manuscript. This would've been a bold move, given the expectations for sequels to go bigger and badder, but it would've been in line with the anthology nature of both the books and the TV series based on them. For the first half, we watch as Slappy worms his way into the lives of the siblings Sarah and Sonny Quinn and the latter's friend Sam, and if I'm being honest, it was the setup for a pretty good, creepy horror-comedy. Slappy may be defanged compared to other villains from adult horror films I've seen, but he was still a quality baddie, even if they got him a different voice actor (why they did that when Jack Black returned to play R. L. Stine, I have no clue).

The film lost me, however, in the second half, where it essentially turned into a remake of the first movie as Slappy concocted a scheme to take over the world from Nikola Tesla's old laboratory in town. Having seen this exact scenario play out just three years ago, and on a bigger budget at that, this film just felt tired, like the writers didn't know how to stretch the first half out to a feature film and instead said "you know what, screw it, let's just reuse the last script." There's no hook to keep me invested in the characters like there was with Hannah's secret in the first movie, and what's more, it didn't even have the Goosebumps villains running around to supply much in the way of fanservice for people who'd read the books; the few we do get, like the Abominable Snowman, are (again) recycled from last time. Instead, Slappy brings Halloween decorations to life, causing the streets to be filled with ghosts, skeletons, mummies, pumpkin monsters, a headless horseman, and the giant balloon spider that serves as one of only two reasons for Ken Jeong's character (Sarah and Sonny's Halloween-loving next-door neighbor) to be in the film. Oh, and Jack Black returns as R. L. Stine for a few scenes to basically do nothing. Save for the cool design on a trio of wicked witches who harassed the heroes, none of it felt all that interesting. The film attempts to make things personal for the heroes by having Slappy kidnap Sarah and Sonny's mother, but what little comes of it is wasted, as is Wendi McLendon-Covey's entertaining performance as the mom. Honestly, this mayhem in the second half might've been better served if this had just been a standalone "Haunted Halloween" movie about props and costumes coming to life that didn't try to tie the Goosebumps brand and the first half of the film to itself, which only furthers my suspicions that the finished product we got here was a Frankenstein's monster of multiple scripts thrown together by too many cooks spoiling the soup.

It sucks, because there were so many moments when this film feels like it could've been good. The actors are all good, the special effects are well-done given the budget, and there are many, many funny jokes and a few genuinely creepy moments here. It's a zany flick that strikes just the right tone to avoid becoming too campy or too grim. Either half of this film probably could've been made into a solid movie in its own right if it had only been given room to breathe, which makes it a shame that the end result is just too scattered to pull itself together. The talent that went into this is undeniable; everybody involved in making this felt like they went in with the expectation that they were making something decent. It's just that, somewhere along the way, things fell apart somehow. It felt like the people writing the film weren't speaking to each other (likely because the script was being passed around to multiple anonymous script doctors) and were expecting the other guys to do the legwork of writing a coherent story as opposed to characters and jokes, and that neither the director nor the editors knew how to finagle a quality film out of it despite their best efforts. There isn't one particular Achilles' heel that brings this film down; every constituent component works on its own, albeit some better than others. But they don't work together.

The Bottom Line

These sorts of misfires are the most painful to review, given that it's hard to tell just what went wrong if you weren't there on set when it was being made. It's a film that, twenty years from now, I can see  being perfect subject matter for a Nostalgia Critic-type show about mediocre films from childhood that you probably loved as a kid for their whiz-bang energy and solid jokes, but which don't hold up once you go back to them. I'm more disappointed than I probably should be, but given that they got it right before and seemed to have some fresh ideas here, it still stings.