Director: Rob Letterman
Writers: Darren Lemke, Scott Alexander
Stars: Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush
1 Hour, 43 Minutes
Get it from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2OgRPQH
A family moves into a new home in Madison, Delaware, and the mother is going to be the new Vice Principal. He meets Hannah, the girl next door and her weird father. She leads him into the woods after school where there’s a fully-powered abandoned carnival in the woods.
They climb up into the world’s largest, darkest, and most dangerous-looking Ferris wheel to talk. When they get home, Hannah’s father tells Zach to stay away from his daughter, “or something very bad will happen.” Later, he hears Hannah and the father fighting, and there’s a scream. He runs over to investigate. He calls the police. The man explains everything away, and the police go home. These are clearly the world’s worst police officers.
Later, he and his friend Champ break into the house’s basement. Inside, they find a bunch of bear traps all over the floor. The find a bunch of Goosebumps manuscripts. They wonder whatever happened to R. L. Stine. The books are individually locked in little lock boxes.
They open a book and the words explode out, creating an abominable snowman. It knocks over the bookshelf and then breaks through the wall and runs off. One other book opens up after the trio run off after the snowman. Hannah knows how to suck the snowman back into the book, but she has to be close to it.
The monster chases them all over, but Hannah’s father finds the book and sucks the monster back into it. It turns out the father is actually R. L Stine, author of the Goosebumps books. He explains that his monsters always seemed real to him, then one day they became really real. When you open a book, you let the monsters out. He and Hannah are ready to leave town.
They go back inside and find Slappy the talking dummy. Slappy burns his book, so he can’t be recalled. He plans to open all the books. Suddenly, they’re surrounded by hundreds of lawn gnomes. Slappy has opened a bunch of books and burned them all. All over town, weird things start happening. Aliens with freeze guns freeze the police.
Zach comes up with the idea of Stine writing a single story with all of his monsters in it, and then he can wrap them all up at once. Stine needs his own special typewriter to write that kind of story. The typewriter is in a glass case in the high school, and there’s a big dance going on. The invisible boy is in the car with them, and he causes trouble for a minute. A giant preying mantis is up next, followed by a werewolf.
Aunt Lorraine runs over the werewolf, and she crushes on Stine immediately. She goes to the police station for help, but that doesn’t work out so well, since that’s where Slappy is hiding out. The others head to the high school… through the cemetery. When the moonlight hits her, Hannah begins to fade away, and Zach realizes that she’s a ghost. Suddenly, there are zombies everywhere.
They get to the school and find the typewriter. Stine needs to find a place to write, and he knows Slappy’s going to come for him. All the students learn about the creatures, and they have to barricade themselves inside the school as Slappy releases the rest of the monsters outside.
Stine decides to make a run for it, knowing the monsters will follow him, leaving everyone else alone. He drives off in a school bus, and sure enough, all the monsters start pursuing him. It’s a trap, and bunch of monsters get blown up and back into words.
The group drives to the abandoned carnival and hides in the funhouse. Stine continues writing the story between running and hiding. Slappy unleashes “The Blob that Ate Everyone,” and the only place they can go is up onto the Ferris wheel. The blob eats Stine, but Zach has the typewriter. The problem is that if he puts all the monsters back in the books, Hannah will go with them, since she really does know she’s a ghost too.
Hannah opens the book, and she, as well all the monsters, fly inside as if it was a black hole.
Not long after, everyone returns to school. Stine and Lorraine are dating, and Stine is now an English teacher at the school. They’re calling it a mutant insect attack. Stine admits he wrote one more book, and this one features the return of Hannah, and this time, she’s real.
Commentary
If you liked the end of Cabin in the Woods, you may like this. It’s much more of an action movie than actual horror, but with the collection of creatures involved, it’s hard not to classify it in with horror movies. I’m not that familiar with the original books (a bit after my time), but even I recognized a few of the creatures.