Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018)
Directed by Ari Sandel
Be careful what you wish for. With their after school junk business, best friends Sonny and Sam hope to find treasure in other people’s trash. But when cleaning out the old Stine house, they open a locked book that frees a supernatural nightmare – Slappy! Now, with the help of Sonny’s sister Sarah, they’re in a race against time to get the sinister dummy and all the creatures he’s brought to life back into the pages before he unleashes total pandemonium!
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What critics compared Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween to
Like its predecessor, the sequel doesn’t want to terrify children so much as give them Halloween funhouse vibes, which director Ari Sandel ( The Duff ) and screenwriter Rob Lieber ( Peter Rabbit ) more or less accomplish.
Directed by Ari Sandel ( The Duff ), the sequel does bring back a few characters and reference the first film, but for the most part, it stands alone.
With no deeper themes to explore, director Ari Sandel (2015's " The Duff ") and screenwriter Rob Lieber (2014's " Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day ") focus on amiably recreating the cliff-hanging blueprint of a middle-grade "Goosebumps" book.
To his credit, director Ari Sandel ( The Duff , Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show ) does manage to pull off one memorable sequence, which pits Sonny and Sam against a swarm of colorful gummy bears that lump together as they try to get revenge on the humans who have gobbled their kind by the handful.
New director Ari Sandel (The Duff) isn’t capable of containing and building the madcap shenanigans that previous director Rob Letterman was able to mount in the first film, instead doubling down on what worked before and mostly sticking to the script.
Director Ari Sandel (“The Duff”) can’t do much with Rob Lieber’s undernourished script, even when he adds a couple of comedy ringers in the form of Ken Jeong as a decoration-obsessed neighbor and Chris Parnell as an awkward pharmacy clerk.
But now Black returns to playing a fictionalized version of author R.L Stine, creator of the Goosebumps series of young adult horror books that inspired the hit 2015 original film of the same name.
Even though its title suggests its a sequel to 2015’s Goosebumps , this is very much its own product with it having next to nothing connecting it to its predecessor; Jack Black returns as Goosebumps author R.L. Stine though, but even his appearance feels more like an afterthought rather than an organic story choice.
As I sat about to watch “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween,” I thought about all the questions I had after 2015’s “Goosebumps.”
From the advertising, I’d assumed Jack Black was AWOL from the “Goosebumps” sequel, and missing his ironic turn as kid’s horror novelist R.L. Stine meant that Columbia wasn’t putting a lot of effort into this sequel to the delightful surprise “Goosebumps” was.
This bit in Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween weakly mimics the mildly amusing meta momentum of 2015’s Goosebumps.