It was nice, rather funny, nicer than I thought, actually. A pity the ending doesn’t make sense. Honestly I have never read the Goosebumps-books, I only know about them because they are famous, so I don’t know if the book-titles mentioned in the movie or the monsters set free are real or not. Well, by real I mean, if they are mentioned in real books or not. I hope they are, it would make the whole thing more cool, but at the same time it would raise the point: do the monsters in the movie bring justice to their image in the books? I can’t judge that. At least not yet, maybe I’ll read them. Can I? I’m afraid I’m now an adult without the ‘young’ before it.
Anyway, details:
Zach and his mom move to Delaware, she’ll be the new vice-principal and he’ll start in a new school. He doesn’t seem bothered at all to leave their former home (wherever that was, I’m not even sure they mention it). His father died the year before, so a change of air might be good for both, to start again.
He immediately meets his neighbour, a nice girl called Hannah, but her father seems to be very grumpy and warns him to stay away from her.
They meet again when she takes him out for a little trip at night.
When Zach hears what seems to be an argument between Hannah and her father, and thinks that she’s in danger, so he runs out and calls the police, but the man says that Hannah went back to her mother and Zach simply heard the television.
There’s a school ball but he’s not going, but his mom has to, so she asks her sister Lorraine to stay with him, but Zach can’t let go, thinking Hannah might be locked up somewhere in her house. He lures her father out and calls the only friend he made at school, Champ, and together they sneak into the house looking for her. Champ (short for Champion) is really scared but follows him anyway. They find a lot of Goosebumps manuscripts; Zach has never read them but Champ is a fan and wants to look at them. They are all locked so Zach takes the key and opens one, when Hannah surprises them. She’s totally fine, but she’s alarmed seeing an opened book and immediately the monster of the story comes out, the abominable snowman, who causes a little mess in the house before heading out. Hannah takes the book and runs after it, and the boys follow her. She’s at an ice rink waiting for the snowman to come close so that she can open the book and suck it back inside it. She fails, the boys try to help her but luckily her father came back in time to save them. While he’s driving everyone back, Zach tricks him into revealing his identity (he’s RL Stine, the Goosebumps author) by slandering his books while praising Stephen King until he snaps.
When they get home, Stine insists they must move again, against Hannah’s will. Of course he plans to take all his books with him, but when he enters the room he’s confronted by Slappy, the evil dummy (when his book fell on the floor it opened by itself, maybe it wasn’t properly locked...?).
Slappy is quite evil and angry for having been locked up all that time, and wants revenge on Stine (also because without Stine nobody will ever lock him inside a book). Slappy starts opening the books and setting them on fire so that the books can’t be reused to trap them again, and causes chaos in the whole town.
Zach, Champ, Hannah and Stine have to fight against evil garden gnomes and escape. Lorraine is attacked by an evil white poodle, while the town is turned upside down by mutant plants, giant insects, and whatnot. Slappy, with the help of a group of aliens (what are they?) freezes (literally) the police, while Zach and the others try to find a solution. Zach suggests writing a new story that will trap them all, but Stine says that it needs to be a real story, with plot and everything, and must be written with his old typewriter which is kept at the school (why? who knows).
To get there, they must escape the invisible boy and also the werewolf, plus a giant mantis (really really huge). Lorraine helps them by running over the werewolf with her car (you can see sparkles between her and Stine, so you can guess right away that they won’t move away after all...) and they sent her to warn the police, but when she gets there she gets frozen as well.
Zach and the others go through the cemetery where Zach discovers that Hannah is not real, she’s also out of Stine’s imagination. They escape a group of zombie (why are they coming out of the ground? I know they are zombie, but in this case why aren’t they coming out of a book?) then they finally make it to the school. Stine confesses to Zach that he felt so lonely that he kept Hannah with him as his daughter, writing her so that she would believe to be real.
They find the typewriter and Stine starts writing by himself while the others try to stall the monsters to give him time to write. Champ saves a girl from the werewolf by biting it with his silver-tooth, and she hugs him and kisses him as thanks.
Since he has to be quick, he starts writing about the events as they happen, naming all the monsters, but Slappy finds him and breaks his fingers with the typewriter’s cover so that he can’t continue writing. He reunites with the kids and decides to confront the monsters and his fears because Slappy and the monsters want him so by staying at the school he’s putting everyone in danger.
Stine and the three kids escape on a school bus, and hide in the same abandoned amusement park that Hannah showed Zach at the beginning of the movie. Stine is imprisoned inside the Blob, and he tells Zach to finish the story himself. He finishes it, but then he hesitates to open the book realising that Hannah will also be trapped inside it (well, why? she’s not a monster..) but she’s ok with it, she knows she’s not real (‘how many sweet sixteen can one girl have?’ according to IMDB). Still Zach doesn’t want to open it so she does so herself and all the monsters are sucked into it, and Hannah too. When Stine arrives, they sorrowful eyes of Zach explain it all and Stine’s smile signals that he understands.
Some time after, Stine is now the new literature prof at Zach’s school, since the other one is still injured after the attack. He’s in a relationship with Lorraine, and he reveals to Zach that he wrote another book to make Hannah alive again and the kids kiss while he burns the book (well, he should have burned it immediately, but it’s more effective to do so in front of the camera I guess. Will Hannah grow up as all the other kids now or she’ll stay sixteen forever? Because that would be a problem if the two kids were to fall for each other, as the kiss suggests...).
The last scene shows Stine hearing a noise when he passes in front of the displayed typewriter, and we hear the invisible boy using the typewriter to write his own revenge story and also saying that he ‘forgot about him’... well now, I understand this is supposed to be the twist at the end, but this thing doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. Maybe I’ve missed something, but what I understand is: we saw and heard Stine list a lot of monsters while he was writing his new story, and this would sit well with the invisible boy’s claim that he forgot about him, meaning ‘you didn’t write my name so I wasn’t sucked into the book with the others’ but this also raises the problem of ‘why was Hannah trapped?’ . Stine for sure didn’t list her among all the monsters, so why was she locked in the book but the invisible guy wasn’t??? Nonsense.
ITA piccoli brividi
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