Film reviews: Goosebumps with Jack Black as RL Stine; The Fifth Wave

The adaptation of RL Stine’s myriad Goosebumps books for the screen presented a monster challenge.

From left, Ryan Lee, Jack Black, Dylan Minnette and Odeya Rush in Goosebumps.

If the book ever does die, it sure will leave a huge hole in Hollywood. Goosebumps and The 5th Wave, fun entertainments both, are the latest films based on successful novels for younger readers. The former presented a larger challenge than the latter: American author RL Stine has penned more Goosebumps books than you can shake a wooden stake at, while his compatriot Rick Yancey has written just two instalments of his The 5th Wave trilogy, with the third due in May.

Credit first, then, to screenwriting team Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People v Larry Flynt), who have crafted a meta-narrative that crams most of Stine’s monsters into a single storyline. This not only makes for a lot of action, but avoids disappointment. Werewolves are my favourite monsters, and the one here is terrific, but viewers who are more into evil clowns, zombies, laser-eyed toy robots, savage levitating poodles or town-wrecking giant insects will also leave satisfied.

This narrative also includes the author: we meet Stine (Jack Black) as the strange neighbour of Gale Cooper (Amy Ryan) and her teenage son Zach (Dylan Minnette), who have just moved to Madison, Delaware, from New York. Stine has a teenage daughter, Hannah (Odeya Rush), and it seems they move house a lot. Stine warns handsome Zach: “Stay away from my daughter, stay away from me … or something very bad will happen.’’

Something very bad does happen, but it’s not what you might expect when two teenagers are attracted to each other. Zach, assisted by Champ (an agreeable Ryan Lee), breaks into the Stine house and accidentally unlocks his manuscripts, which brings the monsters on the page to life. The first is the abominable snowman: “I read what it did to Pasadena. It’s no joke, man,’’ unbrave but well-read Champ squeaks.

The special effects are good: a showdown with the snowman on an ice-hockey rink is both comical and a little scary, just like the Goosebumps books, which are pitched at pre-teens. So is a battle in Stine’s house with malevolent garden gnomes. The latter includes a Lilliputian moment that reminds us Black’s previous collaboration with director Rob Letterman was Gulliver’s Travels in 2010.

The monsters are led by a ventriloquist’s dummy named Slappy, who has “a serious Napoleon complex’’ and is determined to bring down his creator. Black voices Slappy, which is neat: creator and creation are the same person, or two parts of the same person, perhaps. Slappy has all the best lines, particularly in his dealings with the hapless local police. When they advise him to shut his mouth, his response is hilarious.

Black is in good form as the enigmatic Stine, but it is Minnette as Zach who impresses most. He was Jack Shephard’s son in the TV series Lost and, more recently, the older brother in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. He’s an appealing young actor: good-looking, articulate and wryly funny.

So we have an army of monsters hell-bent on eliminating Stine and anyone else who gets in their way. The question is: can Stine, Zach, Hannah and Champ stop them or will the deranged Slappy prevail and prove once and for all that he’s no dummy?

Stine has been called the Stephen King of children’s literature, and there’s a running gag throughout about the horror master. (The real Stine also makes cameo appearance late in proceedings.) But my favourite line is when Stine is asked, while his monsters are doing some serious monstering, why he couldn’t have written about rainbows and unicorns. “They don’t sell 400 million copies,’’ he says. Indeed they do not.

Another story that sells in the millions is that of plucky teens equipped with high-end weaponry battling misguided adults and maybe saving the world along the way. The Hunger Games and Divergent franchises, based on the young adult novels by Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth respectively, are standout recent examples.

Florida-based author Yancey looks set to join the ranks, with The 5th Waveand its sequel The Infinite Sea both New York Times bestsellers. The third book is The Last Star and Columbia Pictures has film rights to all three, working with heavyweight production companies in Graham King’s GK Films and Tobey Maguire’s Material Pictures.

I didn’t know anything about The 5th Wavebefore seeing J. Blakeson’s film and assumed it would be a dystopian action thriller. It is, and a solid one at that, but it’s also consciously comic. I realised this soon after Liev Schreiber turned up as an impassive US Army colonel. “Ray Donovan, what are you doing here?” I wondered, a question he answered with a comic touch so understated it almost isn’t there.

Yancey sensibly has followed the trend in having a young female protagonist. We first meet Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz) in a scene that makes it clear something is rotten in the state of Ohio (and one presumes the rest of the US): she’s 16 and toting an assault rifle in a dilapidated urban landscape. Her hair looks great, though, and this is another neat joke throughout: civilisation may be in ruins, but the cosmetics counters remain open.

In a series of flashbacks we learn what has happened. “I didn’t know it then, but that was the last normal day of my life,’’ Cassie tells us. Indeed: an alien spacecraft enters Earth’s atmosphere and parks, conveniently for our story, directly above Cassie’s house. The aliens do not introduce themselves and become known as the Others. They make their intentions clear enough via a series of attacks. There are four waves, which I won’t say too much about for the benefit of viewers who don’t know the backstory. The second wave, massive earthquakes and tidal waves, is quite spectacular.

But the focus of the action is the titular fifth wave, which ostensibly involves the Others assuming human form to finish off the surviving remnants of humanity. Or does it? When Schreiber’s Colonel Vosch barnstorms into a fortified refugee camp and declares, “We are the US Army and we are here to help”, alarm bells should go off. What follows is an instructive example of what can happen in a country where everyone has a gun.

The plot splits into two related stories: that of Cassie fighting her way to the army base to rescue her little brother Sammy (Zachary Arthur), who has been dragooned into a children’s crusade led by Vosch; and that of the child and teen fighters themselves, who are led by high-school jock Ben Parish aka Zombie (Nick Robinson, another appealing young actor) and emo chick Ringer (Maika Monroe). Their mission is to kill the Others. They report to Vosch but soon have reason to question his motivations. Meanwhile, Cassie is assisted by a handsome woodsman named Evan Walker (English actor Alex Roe), who may not be who he seems.

This general sense of intrigue and uncertainty — who can be trusted in a collapsed world; should you kiss him anyway? — along with the fast pace and, most importantly, the humour make The 5th Wave a promising new entrant in the kids-who-kick-ass genre.

Goosebumps (PG)

3.5 stars

National release

The 5th Wave (M)

3 stars

National release