Goosebumps came out in 2015 and the second one came out in 2018. The movies are based on R.L. Stine books that came out starting in 1979. There is approximately 235 books that have come out being published by Scholastic.
The first one starts Jack Black as Stine and the voice of Slappy, Dylan Minnette as Zach, Odeya rush as Hannah and Ryan Lee as Champ. The story is very well done, you get introduced to the books and the characters pretty much right away. The books or manuscripts are all locked up. Once you open one then the monster comes out and they only way to make it go away is to suck it back into the book. Stine created the monsters to terrorize his neighborhood where he was growing up. He wrote their stories so well that he wrote them into life.
Hannah who is also a monster but doesn’t know it is Sines daughter. She helps Zach get the initial monster that he released back into the book but then all the other books start to come back to life. R.L. Stine plays a part in the movie as Mr. Black.
Slappy the ventriloquist dummy ends up burning the books after they are opened to release all of the monsters. So Stine needs to write a book that encompasses all the monsters into one, suck them into the book and look it to make sure that they don’t hurt anyone. In a nail-biting scene Sines fingers get broken by Slappy and Zach needs to finish the book, which he does but due to him writing all the monsters, Hannah gets sucked into the book as well.
All the monsters of course get sucked back into the book and Hannah goes away. Life continues to go back to normal while Champ and Zach will remember this night forever. The next school day Stine is now teaching at the school goes to Zach and says that his daughter, Hannah is alive due to writing one more book and then burns it so Hannah can be alive forever. It is really sweet but is fantastic that everything wrapped again quite nicely. The movie then ends with Stine walking passed his type writing in the display case at the high school typing letting him know that he forgot the invisible boy, which means that there will be a sequel.
The sequel was ok, it was about Haunted Halloween versus the invisible boy. In the second one it is an entirely new cast and charters but Stine does come back for one scene essentially at the end when all of the monsters have been sucked back into the and he gets it back. Essentially Stine couldn’t figure out how to end his first book so locked it away. Two kids find it and open it releasing slappy. Slappy wants more monsters to come alive so he makes it possible to have all the Halloween monsters come alive on Halloween night. The kids soon figure out how to get the characters back into the book just in time for Stine to arrive. The second movie also makes it possible for another sequel to happen.
I was a fan of the books growing up so I knew that it was going to be a good movie. Would I recommend these movies? The first one yes especially if you are into a family friendly Halloween movie. The second one sure I guess but only if you have seen the first one. Do I hope that they make a third one? I hope not. They do have a lot to go on but I wouldn’t want that to happen. I was hoping that it would bring back some nostalgia and it did. There is so much content that they can really keep going on with movies. I did like Jack Black as Stein. He played the character real well. It was a good role for him. I was also hoping that it would become so popular that they would bring back items like way more books (which I am sure sales did go up), candy and other merchandise but I don’t think that the movies were that popular to have a long lasting in pack. They didn’t make a huge boost where I thought there was ‘all of a sudden’ there was more merchandise out there like I was hoping for. But I hope that it sparked a bunch a new generation to fall in love with the books that they keep being made.