Vincenzo de Divitiis
•Zach and his mother move from New York to a quiet provincial town, not without some reluctance from the boy, who is already shaken by the premature loss of his father. Everything seems to predict a monotonous and flat stay, until the protagonist meets Hannah, the beautiful neighbor, who, however, is closely watched by a strict and mysterious-looking father. After a beautiful romantic walk, the two return home, but during the night Zach hears suspicious noises and screams coming from the neighbors' house to the point of calling the police. The initiative does not have the expected effects, and so the young man, helped by a quirky school friend, gets the father of Hannah out of the house thanks to a trick and enters the villa where he makes a surprising discovery: the owner is none other than R.L. Stine, author of hundreds of horror stories for children. But, as if that were not enough, the worst news is that the monsters born from the writer's imagination are ready to leave the pages of the books to invade the real world.
For all those who grew up in the 1990s, a must during summer vacations was replacing boring school assignments with the reading of short novels destined to become classics, namely the "Goosebumps" series. Stories that were easy to read, not too demanding, and effective in playing with imagination by creating monsters and scary situations of all kinds, not sparing moments of laughter and fun. Although these qualities were suitable for a film adaptation, the love between the book series created by R.L. Stine and the big screen struggled to blossom, and indeed, beyond a forgettable television series broadcast in Italy in the second half of the 1990s, one had to wait until recent times for "Goosebumps" to find a well-defined cinematic version. The honor and burden of such an undertaking falls to Rob Letterman, a director already known in the field of animated and adventure cinema (it is enough to mention "Shark Tale" and "Gulliver's Travels"), who has the great merit of not focusing on a single book in the series and telling it in a pedantic way, with the risk of being predictable, but rather creating a story that intertwines reality with the writer's own fantasy with the aim of leaving room for surprise effects and situations on the verge of the grotesque. A winning and decisive choice to create a lively film capable of eliciting many laughs and even some innocent and "small" thrill (it is indeed the case to say).
With "Goosebumps" Letterman activates an imaginary time machine and takes us back to the mythical 1980s, the golden age of horror cinema, during which many psychological thrillers and splatter films were accompanied by horror films aimed at a younger audience whose motto was the search for easy scares, without resorting to images of explicit violence but rather to not too sophisticated special effects.
The influence of such atmospheres is noticeable starting from the construction of the plot in which we find the conventions of the aforementioned period, ranging from moving to the suburbs to the crush on the neighbor, passing through the horror element that changes the lives of the protagonists and gives the plot the final decisive push to take off. This last ingredient is accompanied by a marked ironic vein that in this case translates into the creation of well-made computer-generated monsters and above all very colorful and garish ones that assume a central role within the long and miraculous adventure sequences. Among these, it is necessary to remember the reckless car chase to escape from a giant praying mantis, the mad race in the supermarket that sees Stine and company facing a werewolf, and the bizarre fight on the hockey field against the muscular yeti. In short, a plot with smooth and well-paced rhythms that culminate in a frantic and monster-filled finale belonging to the collective imagination of the viewer of every age and taste. Even the construction of the characters and the related choice of the cast are in line with the spirit impressed by Letterman on his work.
We indeed have a Jack Black perfect in portraying a writer enslaved by his imagination and forced to face the monsters created by his own mind; a couple of teenage lovers, played by Dylan Minnette and Odeya Rush, perfectly fitting their roles also from an aesthetic point of view as they are good-looking young people; a special mention, finally, for Ryan Lee who surprises with his effectiveness in the role of the classic unlucky kid who is mocked by everyone but who nevertheless manages to take his well-deserved revenge.
"Goosebumps," to sum up, is a very successful product that achieves the goal of capturing both the audience of loyal and nostalgic fans and the younger audience who will surely be stimulated to rediscover the books in the series after watching the film.
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