BEFORE: Yeah, this is sort of a leftover from Halloween time, but it didn't connect with anything there, so I'm dropping it in here. Jack Black carries over from "Envy"
THE PLOT: A teenager teams up with the daughter of young adult horror author R.L. Stine after the writer's imaginary demons are set free on the town of Madison, Delaware.
AFTER: Sometimes you can tell what problems a screenwriter probably was facing, because the solutions that solved those problems are front and center, and here they pretty much smack you in the face. "How do we get people to care about the main character?" Give him a dead dad, and show him moving to a new town and trying to fit in. That will get the audience to sympathize with him, because nearly everyone has trouble fitting in at high school. "How do we get him in contact with the love interest?" Simple, you make them neighbors, fate has thrown them together. "How do we get the geeky character to seem heroic, and not just annoying?" Well, we can give him a name like "Champion" and make sure he's not always just running away from threats. OK, so far, so good?
But then there's "How do we appeal to the fans of ALL of R.L. Stine's many-volumed horror series, because everyone might have a different favorite book?" Well, let's just throw ALL the monsters from ALL of the books into one storyline. We'll make it about the characters somehow getting loose from the books and becoming "real", and all ganging up to threaten the town. OK, that's a bit of a stretch, but you can sort of see why it was done. Then the big question was probably "How do we get R.L. Stine to let us play in his sandbox full of monsters and make a film out of it?" And the answer was to turn the author into a character, played by Jack Black, and give that character the magical ability to create stories that have the power to turn real, and point out at every opportunity that he's a better writer than Stephen King. OK, now you're just kissing the guy's ass.
It's a heavy buy-in, because then you have to make the author "reclusive" and living under an assumed name, where in real life this guy's probably got more money than a rap star and can hire security to keep fans away. Then this weird process of locking the manuscripts to keep the monsters in, but then leaving the key in full view and completely unprotected. So, are we trying to keep the monsters in the books, or not? Because if that's what we want, shouldn't the key be kept, umm, locked up? Like in a safe or something.
Then the rules of how this crazy thing all works keeps changing, which is annoying. Constantly shifting sands. If the monsters destroy the book, then they can't go back into the book, so somebody has to write ANOTHER book with that character in it so he can be absorbed back into it. So confusing, and I'd stopped caring at this point, because it's a completely ridiculous premise to begin with. Show me one fictional character who ever came out of a book and became real. You might as well have had all the characters climb through a magic mirror out of the nightmare dimension, it would been just as nonsensical.
Maybe kids aren't going to care as much as I do about the logistics of everything, and whether these ideas to bring the monsters together are good ones. I sure don't think so, because it feels like everything was done this way for matters of convenience, and not with the intent of crafting a strong narrative.
For example, take my NITPICK POINT #1 - Stine can only craft a new book that will absorb all the monsters if he uses a specific Smith-Corona typewriter. No, my beef is not that a modern-day author would use an old electric typewriter instead of a computer, that's neither here nor there. The question is, why is that typewriter located at the high school, instead of at Stine's house? No explanation is given for this, and Stine didn't start teaching at the school until the very end of the film. So why is the typewriter at the high school? Because the story needed him to go there, and the school dance is taking place there, so for the screenplay's and convenience's sake, that's where the typewriter happens to be. Lazy, lazy, lazy writing.
NP #2: Nobody builds a carnival out in the woods, for safety reasons. Ever notice how a carnival is always built in an open field, or in a large vacant lot? That's because they need room for the rides to move, you couldn't put a Ferris wheel in the middle of a bunch of tall trees like this, because the branches could grow into the path of the wheel, and then you've got a problem, like a stick in a bike's wheel. A forest setting would also prevent people from seeing clearly across the fairgrounds, and that's another safety issue. Not to mention that a forest is filled with dirt, and the rides need flat, solid ground. Sorry, try again. Yes, it's possible that the forest grew up around the abandoned carnival, but that would take decades, and then the rides probably wouldn't be in working condition.
Also starring Dylan Minnette (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Odeya Rush (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Amy Ryan (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Ryan Lee (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Jillian Bell (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Halston Sage (last seen in "Neighbors"), Ken Marino (last seen in "Masterminds"), Timothy Simons (last seen in "Gold"), Amanda Lund, Karan Soni (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Steven Krueger, Keith Arthur Bolden, R.L. Stine
RATING: 4 out of 10 garden gnomes
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