by Mike Hilty, Contributing Writer
When I was in third grade, the Goosebumps book series was all the rage. I had all of them and served as a library to my friends who weren’t allowed to read them. R.L. Stine had a knack for writing compelling stories for kids with varying levels of scares. Some were just duds, but at least they were all a little different. Goosebumps has gone through a lot of different iterations, but this one is on Disney+, which was in need of some Halloween content. I didn’t hate the series, but that’s probably the nicest thing I will say about it.
This version of Goosebumps is a serialized story. It takes components from a variety of stories, while also trying to tell an original one to connect everything. It’s a bit of a mess, because the harder it tries to connect all the plot lines, the messier the story gets. I appreciated the swing, but at the end of the day, it takes a really good story to connect everything. This series has it for a while, and then loses it with the final two episodes.
We follow two parallel stories here. The first is about a group of high school students in a town called Port Lawerence who are haunted by mysterious items. It’s a real Breakfast Club situation, as you have a whole spectrum of students who are connected through clubs, classes, and neighborhoods. Most of them grew up together, so they all know each other pretty well. There’s Isaiah (Zack Morris), the star quarterback of the football team, Margot (Isa Briones), Isaiah’s neighbor and resident nerd of the group, James (Miles McKenna), Isaiah’s best friend and among the wealthier residents of the town, Isabella (Ana Yi Puig), the mysterious basket case who likes to troll people online, and Lucas (Will Price), who’s into extreme sports and making videos of his students. These kids have broadly good chemistry with each other, and their acting is generally fine.
The series fluctuates too much between trying to be funny, scary, and sincere that it doesn’t achieve any of them well enough to stand out. At times, the writing tries to make light of a certain situation, and then there’s a sudden whiplash to a big reveal that is meant to be emotional, but the transition is too clunky.
Scary moments, though, are where these kids and the story shine. This is a little darker Goosebumps series than the original, and some moments can be scary for younger audiences. The effects are used well in some scenes, particularly in the first episode involving an incident on the football field with Isaiah. This isn’t a show I would let my eldest daughter watch until she was a little bit older, and I give the show credit for trying to make a more mature series that had some scarier elements.
Since it tries to jam too much into the eight-episode season, the overall narrative suffers. In the first storyline, the group of kids attempt to figure out what’s going on with all of them and the items they encounter. Each learns a lesson about themselves, whether it’s being careful what you wish for with James, or being comfortable in your skin for Isabella. Lucas’ story is the one that resonated with me the most, because it deals with more mature content like grief in the face of tragedy.
The second storyline involves the mystery surrounding the death of a student named Harold Biddle (Ben Cockell) in 1993. The writing takes some convenience to how each of the main group of kids’ parents may or may not have had something to do with Harold’s death. Then there are sprinkles of the drama not just with the kids and their parents, but also with all the parents themselves. This unfortunately leads to the story suffering a little — there’s so much going on that none of the stories feel complete.
There were two main problems I had with Goosebumps. First is that one character sticks out like a sore thumb in a bad way. Nathan Bratt (Justin Long) doesn’t have any prior connection to the town or the kids, but he’s the new English teacher at the high school. Long is trying to do something over-the-top at times, and it makes him so much different than everyone around him. Nathan is also extremely unlikable, between the whining, the attention he craves from his students, and his desire to mow down everyone he gets to know in an attempt to get ahead in his writing career.
Second, the season could have ended with the sixth episode and provided a satisfying conclusion to both stories. The main item that connects the stories involves a dummy named Slappy (Chris Geere). Once that item is resolved, we dive into two more episodes that try to go back and provide more context to things that are already resolved, while also trying to manufacture more drama and conflict. Had they stuck with what happens in the first six episodes, it would have been a stronger way to end the season.
Goosebumps has the potential to be the teenager version of American Horror Story, where it can take various elements of the original books and combine them to tell a compelling story. I’m not sure it is going to get enough viewership to warrant a second season, but I hope that the tone disparity and the scattered stories get resolved by then. Overall, it is a fun story with the potential to grow, but it needs to learn a little bit of restraint as well.
Rating: It Was Just Okay
Goosebumps is currently streaming on Disney+
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