I got a real kick out an episode of Beetlejuice I watched this morning. I’d forgotten how self-aware the show became as it went on. It makes for an amazing watch now that I’m old enough to actually get all the jokes.
Things kick off with the Neitherworld’s Good Neighbor Day Picnic. It turns out that local law dictates an annual day of niceness, much to the chagrin of The Ghost with the Most. Everyone’s gathered for some quality poetry courtesy of The Monster Across the Street’s nephew, The Little Monster From Around the Corner. Of course, Beetlejuice can’t resist causing some mischief because he’s not a good neighbor, and the whole thing devolves into a massive food fight.
These shenanigans prompt the arrival of a fairy named Goody Two Shoes. She explains that she works for the Bureau of Sweetness and Prettiness – The BS&P. Not even the Neitherworld’s foulest phantom expected that one to make it to air.
Goody Two Shoes repeatedly shows up and uses her magic to temporarily transform the population into cuddly, cuteified citizens. Lydia gets a headful of curly blond locks, and Beetlejuice becomes a bizarre off-brand Mr. Rogers with an insatiable craving for sing-alongs. No matter what anyone tries, the winged witch’s powers are irresistible. She eventually breaks out a super-charged magic wand and turns the entire town into a brightly lit, blue-skyed monstrosity.
Just when everything seems hopeless, Lydia realizes that Goody Two Shoes has an incessant need to criticize and correct. She devises a fiendish plan for everyone to pretend to embrace niceness and prettiness. With nothing to correct, the failed fairy flies into a furious rage that gets her carted off and fired from the BS&P. The Neitherworld goes back to its dark, dreary, and decidedly grotesque condition, and all is well. Then, Beetlejuice lets loose with a string of bleeped-out profanity to wrap the episode and remind everyone that the censors are always watching.
I don’t know any juicy backstage gossip from the Beetlejuice Animation Studios, but I can’t help but wonder how much network meddling a show centered around elementary schooler’s friendship with a bug-eating, armpit-farting ghost and their adventures in Afterlife…er, Neitherworld…must have endured. By this point, the correctors and criticizers must have been completely exhausted. I mean, how did a name like “BS&P” manage to make it past the censors?
It’s funny. When I got into horror, Michael Myers was only bringing home the bronze during the Horror Icon Olympic Games. Freddymania was still running wild, and Jason was doing guest spots on the Arsenio Hall show while poor Michael and the Halloween franchise had to play catch-up after the disastrous release of its third entry.
Michael’s status, or lack thereof, can largely be attributed to timing. Some audiences found him a bit basic compared to immortal dream demons or pissed off goalies. Filmmakers attempted to combat this notion in the “Thorn Trilogy” (Halloween 4-6). Thorn Trilogy is a ridiculous term, by the way.
Whether you’ve contracted that weird obsession with grouping movies into trilogies that’s been going around or not, one thing that The Return, The Revenge, and The Curse of Michael Myers all have in common is their attempt to elevate The Shape in some way….whether it’s by giving him the level of super-strength it takes to jam your thumb into an EMT’s forehead, revealing a mysterious psychic connection with his niece, or introducing a centuries old cult and curse that were *actually* the *real* reasons for The Shape’s evil *the whole time*!!
I usually hate those out-of-nowhere plot twists that pop up late in the game and retroactively force their way into the old story. I’m looking at you Cobra-La. I’m looking at you real hard. And frowning.
But I’m not frowning at The Curse of Michael Myers because, not only is Halloween 6 amazing, it’s a fascinating look at a struggling franchise’s attempt to stay relevant with an ever-evolving audience. And, holy shit, did I just type that sentence? A struggling franchise’s attempt to stay relevant? How can I possibly be saying such a thing about Halloween? The trendsetter. The OG. The King of all slasher movies.
‘Cause it’s true.
Halloween 6 was pretty much cursed from the start – forced to somehow pick up the pieces of Halloween 5‘s open-ended conclusion while also casting all that silly stuff aside and telling a new, more modern, story for new, more modern, audiences who needed new things that were more modern. Of course, “picking up the pieces” is a bit of an understatement considering that Halloween 5‘s wacky writer and director specialized in throwing stuff at the wall without any sort of long-term game plan in mind. Halloween Ended (see what I did there?) for a few years while folks tried to come up with some sort of way of addressing all the dangling threads Revenge left.
So, long story short, we got two movies in one. The Theatrical Cut, hodgepodged together after a bunch of ill-informed children whined about Dr. Loomis, tries real hard to squeeze a somewhat traditional Halloween out of one that presented some of the wackiest developments of the series. All those kids who whined about Dr. Loomis went on to lead very unsatisfying lives, by the way.
But the aforementioned Wacky Halloween, the version we were *supposed* to get before those meddling kids meddled, was the stuff of legend amongst horror fans. Dubbed “The Producer’s Cut,” this version was only available in homemade editions of varying quality before it was finally released in a truly awesome blu ray set that sells for way too much money these days.
While the gist of the movie is the same across both versions, The Producer’s Cut refuses to dance around the more controversial aspects of the story. A cult afflicts Michael with “the Curse of Thorn,” gives him a tattoo, and sends him out into the world to kill off his family….until they decide to break him out of jail, kidnap his niece, and have Michael impregnate her with a child intended to be his last victim because it’s time to pass the curse on to kid named Danny who happens to live the old Myers house and is encouraged to kill folks by a voice that is revealed to belong to the guy who runs the asylum Michael is committed to – leading one to wonder how the doctor manages his work duties with all his traveling time. What a sentence that was. I’m honestly proud of it. I’m also selling the sheer insanity of this story way short. It’s like trying to describe Halloween 5‘s Cookie Woman scene. It has to be experienced to be appreciated.
Despite all that, there’s something about this movie that keeps me coming back. With its curses and cults, it’s one of the Halloweeniest Halloween movies out there. You can tell that the scriptwriter, Daniel Farrands, absolutely loved the franchise because it’s littered with references and callbacks that only the most seasoned fans would notice.
The Producer’s Cut is the more coherent of the two versions – largely because we’re getting the intended story. It lays its cards on the table, consequences be damned. You’ve just got to accept that Michael lives with a crew of Hot Topic shoppers and commits ritualistic incest with his last remaining relative because his pals need him to pass his curse onto the next person by killing the his last remaining relative. Wait a minute…………..
Sure, it’s satisfying to see Michael carve up the cultists in the theatrical version, and maybe it’s a little jarring to see Paul Rudd stop The Shape in his tracks by slicing his palm over a bunch of rocks, but Halloween 6: The Producer’s Cut of Michael Myers is essential October viewing. For me, at least. Amanda hates it.
For some reason, folks really love taking villains and looking at them through the good old “tragic figure” lens. It’s nothing new. We’ve done it forever. Even Satan, himself, is written to be relatable and even maybe just a smidge sympathetic in Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and, if you’ll excuse me for a second, I’ve got to run to eBay and reward myself for making a reference to Classical Literature instead of a movie or cartoon or comic book or video game. There’s still a smidge of scholar buried somewhere beneath the pop culture nostalgia that consumes 98% of my being. We love feeling sorry for bad guys, and that’s not always a bad thing. The best baddies always think that they’re justified and right, so why shouldn’t they be relatable – misguided or not?
But some villains don’t necessarily subscribe to that whole “the bad guy has to think he’s the good guy” thing, and one of them just so happens to be a guy who is quickly becoming the mascot for the misunderstood weirdo rejected by the mean ol’ world and driven to his breaking point – The Joker. It drives me to the store to get nuts with Michael Keaton. I love Mr. J, but come on. This isn’t a guy you’re supposed to feel sorry for.
The Clown Prince of Crime doesn’t think he’s misunderstood. He doesn’t think his actions are justified. That’s the whole point. The Joker revels in his depravity. He’s not under any illusions about what he’s doing. He’s out to kill people until he gets Batman’s attention. If Matt Hooper showed up in Gotham, he’d tell you that The Joker is a miracle of evil-lution. He kills and laughs and thinks about Batman. And that’s all.
Alan Moore was the first writer to toy with the idea of Joker being someone audiences could feel sorry for in 1988’s The Killing Joke. The book suggests that, prior to taking a dip in the chemical concoction that transformed him into a human playing card, The Joker was a struggling comedian desperate to support his pregnant wife. He unwittingly becomes the fall guy for a robbery and winds up taking his pivotal swim in an attempt to escape Batman. When he realizes that he’s become a permaclown, his mind snaps, and The Dark Knight’s greatest adversary is born. But, hey, don’t be too mad at him. He was just a sad guy trying to get by. Well, maybe. One of the big reveals of The Killing Joke is The Joker’s unreliable memory. He’s not quite sure who he was or how he came to be, and he couldn’t care less.
It’s ironic that the idea of The Joker as an unfortunate victim of cruel circumstance originated in a book that ultimately tells us that the whys and hows and wheres and whens don’t matter one bit. He’s irredeemably evil. He paralyzes, strips, and photographs Barbara Gordon in a maniacal attempt to drive her father insane and prove that poor old Commissioner Gordon is just like everyone else – just like Good Ol’ Mr. J, himself. Joker thinks that the Commissioner is “one bad day” away from depraved insanity, but he’s proven wrong by the end of the story and even rejects the idea of rehabilitation before heading back to the asylum…..or being strangled to death off-panel while sharing a laugh with Batman if you prefer that interpretation. Either way, The Killing Joke‘s message is simple: Joker is wrong and crazy and evil and you shouldn’t feel sorry for him just ’cause he had a bad day. It was a pretty bad day that time I woke up and discovered that my dog decided to use my home office as a toilet, but I didn’t go out shopping for purple clothes and start killing people. I pouted and drank alcohol. Like a decent person.
People’s wacky fixation and romanticization of The Joker seemed to kick into high gear in the aftermath of Heath Ledger’s performance and subsequent death before The Dark Knight even made it to theaters. Ledger gave the world a more grounded version of the character that fit quite nicely into Chris Nolan’s realism-based Batverse and hardly came across as sympathetic or redeemable. But, for whatever reason, a chunk of the audience managed to find merit in the character’s meaningless philosophizing – just like poor old Harvey Dent in the movie. At least Harvey had an excuse; he burned half his face off. The man lost an eyelid. That pales in comparison to being laughed at by people or having your crush tell you to stop being weird because they’re not interested. At least you can still blink.
Joaquin Phoenix’s turn as the character only doubled down with the “oh this poor guy – if only people weren’t so mean to him!” narrative by envisioning Mr. J as a downtrodden, lonely man who laughs uncontrollably at inappropriate times seemingly thanks to a kooky medical condition that I looked up just now and verified the existence of – which makes me second guess my use of the word “kooky.” I’m sticking with it, though. You know who else would? The Joker. Because he doesn’t care about your feelings.
It’s funny how things play out. The Joker got his very own (and very short-lived) comic book way back in 1975. Because the stories consisted of the character running amok in his constant mission to assert himself as the #1 criminal in Gotham, there was a strict company decree that every issue must end with the Jester of Genocide captured and returned to his cell (except for the one where he seemingly falls to his death only to show up unscathed in in the next issue). Forty-four years later, we get Joker: The Movie, and the guy once referred to as “The Thin White Duke of Death” is reimagined as a victim of the ruthlessly uncaring world that refused to give him a chance. Boo hoo.
Times change and characters evolve. If I were twenty years older, I’d be lamenting the fact that Batman hasn’t had a good, honest dance sequence since the 60s. If I were twenty years younger, then I’d probably think that The Dark Knight was the greatest comic book flick of all time and that Michael Keaton’s Batman wasn’t comic accurate enough. Just typing that made my skin crawl. I’ll take age and good taste over youthful ignorance. So there.
With the recent Darkside of the Ring episode on the life of the Junkyard Dog fresh in my mind, and the 25th anniversary of World Championship Wrestling’s Bash at the Beach 1998 PPV also fresh in my mind, amidst a swirl of rose-tinted nostalgia for things I witnessed live and things I witnessed on tape years after the fact, all of it made for a sort of mental hurricane heading straight for The New Orleans Superdome on June 1st, 1985.
Down in Louisiana in 1985, professional wrestling was still being presented in a territorial fashion, and the local promotion was Mid-South Wrestling, run by promoter Bill Watts. Mid-South Wrestling ran shows in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, and it had a weekly television show to advertise the live shows in cities across the territory. Mid-South Wrestling didn’t rely on chiseled physiques and flashy characters, instead featuring big, tough grapplers engaging in feuds over personal and professional issues.
One of the most popular wrestlers in Mid-South was The Junkyard Dog, a charismatic, gravelly voiced, dog chain wearing street fighting type. The Junkyard Dog resonated with the territory’s sizable black wrestling fanbase, who bought tickets in droves to see one of their own at the top of the card, which was a rarity in professional wrestling in 1985. The Junkyard Dog (and promoter Bill Watts) made wrestling history when he won the territory’s top championship, making him the first black champion for any major promotion in wrestling.
But by 1985, Vince McMahon, the promoter of the World Wrestling Federation, had begun his push to destroy territory wrestling, offering huge contracts to the top stars in territorial promotions across the country. One by one McMahon bolstered his roster with these regional stars and the territorial promotions simply couldn’t find replacements, and ticket sales began to suffer, and eventually, these once revered regional promotions closed up shop.
Junkyard Dog would be one of many Mid-South Wrestling stars to take McMahon’s money, which left Mid-South promoter Bill Watts in a predicament. He had lost the star that could appeal to much of his audience. He needed a new black superstar.
Watts found The Snowman, a Memphis based journeyman wrestler who wore flashy hats and had a decent physique. Watts introduced Snowman to Mid-South TV and began to push him the top of the card in a feud with Jake Roberts, leading to a grudge match at the Superdome in June of 1985. The trouble was, The Snowman had the look, but he lacked the ring talent and most importantly he lacked the microphone skills of The Junkyard Dog. Something had to be done, so Watts enlisted Muhammad Ali to be in The Snowman’s corner alongside Ernie Ladd for the match with Roberts with hopes that it would be enough to elevate the Snowman to the main event.
It was still a novel concept to feature a sports celebrity in any capacity in a wrestling match, and when done right, the result can indeed be enough to elevate every wrestler involved to new heights. At the end of the match, when it seemed like the nefarious Jake Roberts was going to defeat the Snowman, Muhammad Ali intervened, dealing Roberts a stiff right hand allowing the Snowman to retain the Mid-South Television Championship. The crowd of 11,000 erupted and for a second, it looked as if Watts had indeed found his new Junkyard Dog, with a little help from Muhammad Ali. But it wasn’t enough, and the Snowman would disappear from Mid-South altogether, leaving Bill Watts searching for a way to replace The Junkyard Dog. Jake Roberts would soon depart Mid-Wrestling for the WWF, where he would carry a live snake to the ring and become a household name.
The match itself became a sort of legend, because at the time, territorial promotions didn’t sell tapes of their big shows (if they were filmed at all) so the only way to see any footage at all was to find someone who owned a VCR in 1985 (which was rare) that had recorded it. As such, the infamous confrontation between Jake “The Snake” Roberts, who had become a top star in the WWF, and Muhammad Ali was nothing more than a rumor of pre-internet wrestling fandom, with those that had claimed to see the footage making claims that were all but irrefutable about the match itself since so few had seen it.
For a young wrestling fan like me, it became one of those matches that I just had to see. And so I set out on a quest to finally view this huge moment in Mid-South wrestling history.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #10 – Diary of a Mad Mummy
Premise:
Get ready to embark on an adventure in San Francisco’s super cool Pyramid Building during your family vacation. You go on lots of family vacations. It sort of seems like these books aren’t putting as much effort into the setup. Just “you’re on vacation, here’s something wacky!” The building is hosting a mummy exhibit that you can’t wait to check out. When you do, you stumble on a seemingly unnoticed diary…written by none other than the mummy, himself! Why would a mummy keep a diary? And why is it in English? And why are you the only one who noticed it? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this scribbling mummy has plans to escape TONIGHT. It’s up to you to decide whether to sneak away from your parents to read more of the diary for crucial plot details or take it with you to the hotel room. The choice is yours. How are you going to unravel this mystery?
Nelson’s Story:
I was sorely tempted to pick the “run into the elevator to sneak off to read” option just because the idea of a mummy’s diary being so scandalous that you can’t look at it in front of adults is hilarious. I just didn’t have the energy for a bunch of running around in the Pyramid Building. If I was going to take in the wit and wisdom of a withered pharaoh, then I needed to be comfortable. And room service. Ironically, I didn’t get to read the book because the room service my little sister ordered never arrived, and apparently I am unable to read if my sister’s room service order isn’t fulfilled. Instead of checking with the front desk to see what the problem was, everyone just went to bed. We’ve got a unique family dynamic.
Even though I didn’t get to read the diary or find out anything about the unhappy pharaoh, I decided to sneak back into the Pyramid Building to catch a glimpse of a real, live mummy. I crept past the guard thanks to my mastery of stealth only to discover that I’d arrived too late. The display was empty! What a waste of time that turned out to be. Or….so I thought………
I caught sight of a torn piece of bandage and realized that the mummy must have left it behind because I’m really smart and observant like that. Sadly, I should have been more concerned about hygiene because things went horribly wrong when I decided to throw caution to the wind and pick up a used bandage. It sprung to life, wrapping itself tightly around me – as if I were becoming a mummy, myself. But a kid turning into something against their will? No way. Never in these books.
As I stood there, trapped in the clutches of the bad bandage, the mummy reappeared and touched my face, triggering a magical transformation. Suddenly, like an Ancient Egyptian T1000, it morphed into a perfect replica of me. As if that wasn’t enough, I started shriveling up under the bandages, completing my metamorphosis into a desiccated, undead creature. I was powerless to stop my Mummy Decoy from running off into the night, potentially claiming my awesome preteen life and maybe even my sister’s elusive room service order. The injustice of it all still enrages me to this day. So much so that I dared break the cardinal “don’t seek help from your family after transformation” rule by choosing to flee back to the hotel room, hoping to rectify this ghastly gaffe.
Of course, this was a terrible idea. It’s always a terrible idea. Adults are never any help in these situations. I barely made it two steps out of the building before I was swiftly abducted by a group of overzealous doctors eager to “see inside” a real mummy. Thankfully, their fascination leaned more towards x-rays than autopsies, sparing me from having my stylish leathery skin sliced and diced.
The doctors miraculously discovered a tiny microchip in my skull and realized that Ancient Egyptians were super smart – which made me super popular! I was featured in magazines and newscasts and all sorts of neat stuff. But, when I tried to put pen to paper and tell everyone that I was just a kid who missed his family, I realized that I could only write in hieroglyphics! The…end? Or I guess I should say….that’s a wrap!
Amanda’s Story:
I headed for the elevator, thinking the mummy wouldn’t appreciate me taking his diary. The basement was weird, and there was no janitor! Book Me adamantly believes that janitors belong in basements.
I had to choose between a tunnel and some steps. I like tunnels, but this one smelled funny and started to narrow, so I went back to the stairs.
The steps somehow led me to an exit outside the Great Pyramid in modern-day Egypt, but I was still fixated on the diary. Now it was written in hieroglyphics, so I panicked. When I tried to reenter the pyramid, a security guard stopped me. I showed him the diary, but a random American appeared and declared that it belonged to “Buthramaman.” Both of them wanted it, so I made the logical decision and ran away.
In the scorching desert heat, I took a break and glanced at a page in the diary. It had a symbol resembling a group of birds around a campfire or an ancient Egyptian smiley face. It was up to me to decide. Clearly, it was birds enjoying a good camping trip. This led me to a Sphinx statue who ordered me to GO BACK and not trespass on the graves of kings. I felt defeated until a crowd ran from the statue, and someone yelled “cut.”
It turned out to be an American film crew shooting an Illinois Smith adventure picture. I love those adventure movies, so I jumped at the chance to talk to Goosebumps Harrison Ford. But I was disappointed because I wanted help with the diary, and Illinois Smith wrote his autograph over the page, making it indecipherable. That’s where my journey ended. I assumed I could at least get some help from the film crew and find my way home eventually, but who knows?
This story’s concept was thinner than Tony Khan’s long term booking plans, but what can I say? I got a kick out of it – even if I once again fell victim to R.L. Stine’s shapeshifting shenanigans. It’s hard to complain when your wife gets to chill with Harrison Ford on the set of the latest Illinois Smith flick. I also couldn’t help but notice that, despite having an older and a younger sibling, neither one of them had any significance to the plot at all. They just faded into the background in both of our adventures – which is perfectly fine with me because Goosebumps siblings are spawned from the depths of Hell.
By the time it entered its sixth season, Matlock wasn’t afraid to experiment with changing up its tried and true formula. See what I did there? *Tried* and true? Sometimes humor flows through me like mood slime through Dana Barrett’s bathtub faucet.
There’s an episode where Matlock becomes the prime target of a serial killer, a twisty tale where he defends a client who’s actually guilty of murder but claims justifiable homicide, and even a supernatural escapade where the loquacious legal luminary tackles a murder case on behalf of the victim’s ghost. These shenanigans make the whole “prisoners taking over a penitentiary and demanding a mock trial” seem as grounded and stripped of magic and wonder as Chris Nolan’s Batman movies. But nothing quite compares to The Nightmare – an episode that sees Matlock embark on a quasi-time travel adventure to the Wild West, riding to the rescue of a wrongfully accused man facing the gallows.
So Matlock doesn’t literally hop in a time machine, but it’s close enough. He gets hit on the head while on the way to a dude ranch vacation with his legal team – Michelle and Conrad – and Julie March, his prosecutor girlfriend. They even bring Lieutenant Brooks since he gives the team all that sweet, sweet unsupervised access to crime scenes.
Matlock’s crew has it made. Imagine spending your workdays listening to your boss strumming his guitar and your downtime roping and riding at fancy resorts. Sure, they can’t bring guests or family along like Ben does with Julie, but hey, who needs ’em when you’re rolling with the world’s greatest defense attorney? And let’s not worry about the fact that said attorney is openly dating his opposing counsel, who frequently dismisses his clients. Pure coincidence.
The bus breaks down en route to the dude ranch, and our ornery hero takes a bonk on the noggin – only to wake up in a town straight out of a classic Western flick. Matlock, decked out in a snazzy cowboy-ized take on his trademark grey suit, stumbles upon his friends who are all delightfully different in this Western dimension. Julie owns a boarding house, Michelle runs a brothel, Bob’s the town drunk, and poor Conrad is a farmhand accused of shooting the sheriff in the back after challenging him to a duel. How is he ever going to get out of that pickle? Luckily for him, Pecos Matlock doesn’t stand for injustice.
This episode is a gold mine of procedural television wonders and delights. Sure, we still get the classic “whodunit” formula, but it features Matlock on horseback, cruising through town, stumbling upon black-hatted cowboys in the midst of their Official High-Stakes Poker Game. All black-hatted cowboys are required to participate in at least one High Stakes Poker Game per week. It’s a rule, and they’ll snatch the black hat right off your head if you break it.
Matlock is just the man to bring law and order back to this sleepy little town that he didn’t dream up a name for – even if it means incurring Julie’s unholy wrath since the slain sheriff just so happens to be her brother. She’s completely sure that Ben is defending a guilty man because she’s *always* completely sure that his clients are guilty. And she’s never, ever right. On the upside, at least she’s not working for the DA’s office in this wacky western world.
Michelle’s role in this episode continues the show’s bizarre tradition of having Nancy Stafford attempt to seduce an uncomfortable Andy Griffith for laughs. It happens over and over again. Before she was cast as Michelle, she shows up as a prostitute who digs Ben’s vibe in the first season – leading to a hilarious hotel room encounter. In the fifth season, Michelle makes a bet with Conrad over how susceptible her boss is to her womanly wiles. Not very. Conrad wins the bet. This time around, Michelle herself is a woman-of-ill-repute, and she’s eager to add Matlock to her list of clientele. Unfortunately, Mistress Michelle is the real killer, and the only intimate time the real killer gets to spend with the Man in Grey is on the witness stand.
After he unravels the tangled web of the Wild West mystery, Ben is jolted back to reality when he wakes up from his Western dream and stumbles upon an unexpected twist—the bus repairman who fixed their broken-down ride was none other than the judge in his cowboy caper! But….how could the rootin’ tootin’est defense attorney on Earth have dreamed about the repairman before he met him?! Someone call Fox Mulder.
I’m just going to come right out and say it. I want a Western Matlock show, and someone needs to figure out how to make AI create it, stat. And, while they’re at it, let’s get The Adventures of Matlock and Mulder, too.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #8 – The Knight in Screaming Armor
Premise:
Your Uncle Will is coming to town with your cousins Kip and Abbey in tow. They’re from England, so your dad amuses himself by using a fake British accent and spouting out stereotypical British phrases with every sentence that comes out of his mouth. In addition to his kids, Uncle Will has also brought two suits of armor packed into two wooden crates – one labeled “Good Knight” and the other labeled “Evil Knight.” Your cousins warn you that there’s a curse on the evil armor that threatens to exterminate your entire bloodline. There’s even a handy label on the evil crate that promises its knight will bring “misery and woe” to any souls unfortunate enough to run afoul of the medieval Michael Myers.
One night, you’re awakened by a mysterious screaming in the basement. You and your cousins head downstairs to check it out and discover the crates are shaking and howling and all sorts of crazy stuff. The most logical thing to do is open them, and that when it’s officially time to make the big, pivotal choice that decides how your story will go: Do you open the crate with the Evil Knight determined to kill your whole family…or the Good Knight who you haven’t heard all that much about, but, hey, he’s good…right?
Nelson’s Story:
I made it a point to throw caution to the wind this time out and boldly dare R.L. Stine to do his worst. So, I opened up the evil crate. After all, the good crate seemed like one of those decoy “safe” choices these books tend to throw at you. I decided that we might as well get down to business.
The evil knight emerged from his prison, reiterated his vow to rip my family tree up by its roots, and then chopped of the back of the crate that once contained his horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad evil. Somehow, this created a portal that the knight promptly went through. This seemed like a good thing, and I was more than happy to go back to bed, but my cousins and I weirdly decided to follow the knight through the newly-opened portal because we were stupid and had a death wish. This was a terrible idea, and there was no reason whatsoever to do it. But, I didn’t have a choice. Literally.
So we found ourselves in sixteenth century England with a bloodthirsty brute determined to chop our heads off. For some reason, the evil knight decided that the best way to accomplish this was by sending a herd of stampeding sheep our way. Everyone knows that there’s no stampede worse than a sheep stampede.
The sheep chased us into a bunch of “prickly bushes” where we were greeted by two pixies eager to lend a helping hand. One of them suggested we go left, and the other strongly recommended heading to the right. I’m left-handed, so the choice was easy for me. Sadly, not everyone learned to love and appreciate The Leftorium. My decision caused a big hedge maze to grow up around us, and, like a pack of teenaged Jack Torrances, we were going to have to find our way out!
At this point, the book gave me a maze and tasked me with getting through it in one try. I was honest and admitted that I hit a dead-end. I figured the book would just figure I was lying and hit me with a nasty surprise, anyway. No deal. My cousins and wandered around until we died. Then our dead bodies decomposed into plant food. On the plus side, the hedges found us delicious.
What the hell, Stine?
Amanda’s Story:
I chose to open the Good Knight crate, but we were attacked by lawn care equipment and Abby was knocked to the ground by the Evil Knight crate.
Feeling a bit bitter, I once again decided to open the good guy crate, only to find an empty box – except for a note left by that darned Evil Knight telling us that we’d have to find the missing good armor in order to defeat him. After reading the note, we quickly fell asleep because we just couldn’t help ourselves.
When we awoke, we were in a medieval museum. Mud Beasts started coming out of the walls pelting us with mud. I somehow managed to figure out that these guys weren’t real at all and hoisted one into the air and threw his fictional ass to the ground. We were instantly back in the garage and all agreed that nothing weird had happened. A dream? A drug trip? Who knows?
Maybe we just didn’t make choices that resulted in good stories because The Knight in Screaming Armor was pretty underwhelming. It offered up the least interesting premise so far, and the ensuing adventures felt a little “been there, done that.” At least Amanda got the “it was alllllll in your head” ending, though. I rotted away into plant food.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #8 – The Curse of the Creeping Coffin
Premise:
It’s the summer, and you’re “so bored you could eat flies” because you’re too cool to appreciate a shocking new twist to a tried and true Goosebumps formula: your parents are off on vacation and have left you behind to stay with your grandmother – who just so happens to have a cemetery in her backyard! Unfortunately, this is no ordinary cemetery. You immediately realize that the headstones are moving towards the house! Or the coffins? Or both? Or maybe R.L. Stine believes that headstones are attached to coffins? It doesn’t matter because a ghost shows up in the house right in the middle of a conversation with Grandma. She’s Elvira Martin, and she’s getting ready to take over your room thanks to the eeeeevil Curse of the Creeping Coffins! All of the headstone/coffins are slowly converging on the house, and a whole mess of ghosts are planning to move in! Waitaminute. Isn’t this book called The Curse of the Creeping Coffin? Now they’re all creeping?
Nelson’s Story:
I quickly realized that I was the only one who could see Elvira, so there was no use trying to tell my grandmother about her and being called a “goose” for the millionth time. My grandmother loves calling people gooses. It’s one of her things.
Anyway, I followed Elvira upstairs to my bedroom only for her to be super rude. I wasn’t only dealing with a ghost, I was dealing with “a ghost in a very bad mood!” The spiteful spirit warned me to stay far, far away from a local ghost hunter named MacFarling before kicking me out of my own room. She may have been rude, but it was awfully considerate of Elvira to give me the neat tip about the spiritual specialist. Conveniently enough, the Mysterious MacFarling was listed in the Yellow Pages under ghost hunter. Kids today can have their Google. Nothing beat the good old-fashioned Yellow Pages.
MacFarling turned out to be a cool college guy with cool piercings, cool sunglasses with cool blue lenses, and cool ghost catching equipment. I was so enamored by his coolness that I hardly noticed the fact that his office was actually a garage. It didn’t matter. This guy was practically an adult, and he believed my kooky story about moving coffins. An adult who believes you….in a Goosebumps story? That’s like tripping over the Ark of the Covenant on the way to the bathroom or beating Dark Link without using Din’s Fire or the Biggoron’s Sword. It just doesn’t happen.
Even though he didn’t accuse me of being crazy, MacFarling was no exception to the “no one older is going to be of any help” Goosebumps Golden Rule. After pulling up to Grandma’s house and conferring with his Spirit Counter, the paranormal investigator and eliminator declared that there were ten ghosts on the scene, and ten is way over his limit! Guess he missed the whole “no job is too big; no fee is to big” lesson in Ghostbusting 101.
Before splitting the scene, the Junior Ghostbuster Reject took some time to offer up some key expository details on my plight. I was going to need to locate and battle someone called the Keeper of the Sword, take their sword, and plunge it into the grave of the MPG (Most Powerful Ghost), and I needed to act fast because MacFarling mapped out the cemetery and discovered that the first letter of the last name on every moving tombstone spelled out “YOU WILL DI_ SOON.” Once the message was complete…I’d die! Soon!
I went back inside and managed to escape a mischievous pair of spectral twins before finding myself trapped between two fearsome phantoms – a sword-brandishing Civil War general and a fencing champion. It was up to me to decide which one of these ghouls was the all-powerful Keeper of the Sword. I figured a soldier was a pretty solid choice for a sword keeper, but, sadly, I figured wrong! Nooooooo!!!
The soldier chased me out of the house and forced me to take refuge in a barn. A barn full of chickens. Vampire chickens. Vampire chickens that swooped in, bit me, and left me “in a fowl mood. Better cluck next time.”
So I didn’t exactly score the “happy” ending, but I can say that I was ecstatic to have been spared a “you’ve turned into a chicken!” plot twist.
Amanda’s Story:
I chose not to call the ghost hunter because I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost, obviously. I instead went upstairs to the attic where I encountered a ghost horse named Glory and discovered that I wasn’t able to lasso because I’m from the wrong state. R.L. Stine can be very judgmental.
My lack of skills ultimately didn’t matter because a ghost cowboy showed up and gave me an hour-long lesson in the art of lassoing. Once I had the Glory lassoed, I decided to show my gran. She was thrilled by my trick, but thought it was just that. She’s up to date with those “holograms and video games.” So, she aimed her remote control at Glory and, with the click of a button, the house shook and the ghost horse doubled in size.
My grandmother was totally cool with the giant horse and decided it was time for a soda. She asked if I’d like one, but book me was more interested in which button on the remote she pressed. It turned out that she had turned up the volume. I just knew book me was going to take this too far, and I was right. I couldn’t be satisfied by just turning down the volume and returning the ghost horse to normal size. I had to push the channel up button – which turned the ghost horse into a ghost Kungfu master, then a ghost Egyptian Pharaoh, and even worse, an angry Neanderthal that also happened to be a ghost.
I wound up being beaten to death by the Neanderthal because, like my real grandparents, Book Granny only had 3 channels. I hope she at least got to enjoy her soda before discovering my body.
So there you have it. Amanda and I both failed in our quest to save Grandma from getting kicked out of her house by crew of spiritual squatters. Did she go on to discover that her favorite grandchild was attacked by vampire chickens or beaten to death by an unrelenting savage? That, dear readers, is up to you.
When I finally managed to beat A Link to the Past, I thought I was satisfied. I’d tackled a game I’d been trying to finish since I was in high school. I’d conquered one of the legendary old school Zeldas that didn’t offer as much handholding and easy access to power-ups as the later entries. I wasn’t just a casual anymore; I was a real, dyed in the wool Zelda Vet.
Except I’d never beaten the NES original. Ever.
It confused and frustrated me the first time I played it as a kid, and I made minimal progress anytime I tried to re-play it as an older gamer who’d survived the horrors of King Bowser’s invasion of Dinosaur Land and brought the evil Shredder’s time travel schemes to a screeching halt.
The Legend of Zelda didn’t attend recess because it didn’t have time to play. It wasn’t a friendly, colorful video game. It was a grueling gauntlet that refused to let you breathe. You either struggled through it or hung your head in shame as you switched over to a rousing game of Bugs Bunny’s Birthday Bash. Or Kirby. Or even that godawful Beetlejuice game. Anything to make you forget the horrors of the Lost Woods and the absurdity of Monster Bait.
If you’re like me and eager to prove your mettle to the Kingdom of Hyrule and save the princess, then here are some tough truths to keep in mind:
Rupees Mean Something
Rupees are the official currency of the Zelda series. Beyond upgrading Link’s wallet to allow him to carry more, they never seemed like a big deal. There wasn’t much of anything to buy that you couldn’t find for free with a little exploring. Games like Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess threw Rupees at you like you were Oswald Cobblepot delivering a political speech to the people of Gotham….and, you know, the Gothamites were throwing video game money instead of tomatoes. Forced references aside, the point is that you could fight enemies, cut bushes, roll intro trees, or even hop across platforms successfully to easily stuff your wallet to maximum capacity and keep it that way.
That’s not the case with Zelda 1. At all. If you want money, you’re going to have to fight for it, and you’re going to need to fight quite a bit. You can’t get some pretty essential upgrades without cash in hand. You get a handy bow in the first dungeon, but if you want to shoot some arrows, you’ve got to hit up a shop and buy them – except you’re not buying sets of five or ten. You’re buying the ability to shoot arrows from your bow…..at a rate of one Rupee per shot! If you want to one-shot some of the more frustrating enemies like the Poe Voices, then all you can do is pony up the dough.
Arrows are the least of your worries though. Want to upgrade your defenses and get a nifty white outfit? 260 Rupees, non-negotiable. And you definitely want to up your defense, by the way. Need a shield that deflects nearly every enemy projectile in the game? The shield you start with is nearly useless, so of course you’re going to want that sweet, sweet Magical Shield. For 130 rupees. Or 140 if you’re in the wrong shop. It may not sound like that bad of a deal, but by the fifth time you’re buying a new Magical Shield because a slug in a dungeon ate the one you had and you don’t get it back after it’s eaten like you do in Ocarina, you’re a little tired of buying that damn thing. Especially since you’re also going to need to cough up 68 bucks for a red potion, and you’ll want one of those. Only one though. Stocking up on multiple life elixirs isn’t a thing in this game. Deal with it.
You’re Going To Die
Making it through Ocarina without dying a single time used to be a big deal to me. I’ve deleted entire save files over moving the death counter up from 000 to 001. I took pride in overthrowing Ganondorf and saving the world without watching Link collapse in defeat and staring down that evil Game Over screen. In other games, I’m content to die five thousand times en route to the final stage, but Ocarina was no game. It was an experience. Dying ruined that experience for me.
I died in Zelda 1. I died a lot. Over two-hundred times, actually. I’m not ashamed of this number. I’m proud of it because it means that I refused to quit even in the face of the game telling me, point blank, “you’re awful at this.”
Later titles in the series have a knack for giving you just what you need right when you need it. Don’t have any bombs to take on the boss in the next room who can only be defeated by bombs? No worries; here are two bushes you can cut to find enough explosives for Renny Harlin to start working on his next film. Out of magic, or hearts, or arrows? Check those breakable pots that just so happen to be in every corner of the room you’re fighting the big, mean monster in. Even in an absolute worst case “I don’t see any bushes or pots or rocks” scenario, you can backtrack a screen or two and kill a bat who will conveniently drop whatever you happen to be lacking.
NES players didn’t get that advantage. There aren’t pots to break. There aren’t bushes to cut or rocks to lift. You can’t even rely on killing bad guys to pick up enough hearts to stop that unrelenting “you’re almost dead!” beep you get when the life meter gets too low. If you’re in a dungeon and are running low on life, be prepared to leave, find a shop, and lay down some of your hard earned rupees for a red potion. Of course, you’ve got to have the Rupees to do that, so you may need to go on a money-gathering run before you can buy the potion and find your way back to the dungeon for another shot at reclaiming a shattered piece of the Triforce and restoring piece to the ruined Hyrule.
(Don’t Go Looking for) Cracks in the Pavement
One of the defining aspects of the series is all of the hidden wonders just waiting to be uncovered by inquisitive gamers with eyes for detail and the ability to spot cracks in the walls that, in some instances, are large enough to see the secret room and secret contents “hidden” on the other side. Eventually, the games progressed to the point where you could “test” whether or not something would blow up by smacking it with your sword and getting a distinct “this will explode!” sound cue. While this made things a little transparent, I always thought those sorts of red flags were necessary for things like Zelda. I mean, what was I supposed to do, go around bombing every wall in desperate search of a dungeon key or an item I’d missed? Of course not! No game would be that dastardly!
Zelda 1 is a sneaky scoundrel of a game. Wanna find secret rooms and hidden caves or find your way out of that dungeon that you’re stuck in after spending an hour going through every single door and taking every possible path to the boss room? Start planting bombs. Everywhere. Did you run out? Go buy more.
The Legend of Zelda doesn’t just refuse to hold your hand. It smacks you in the knuckles with a ruler for even asking.
It’s rigorous. It’s harsh. As the old guy in the cave who gives you the wooden sword warns: it’s fucking dangerous.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #7 – Under the Magician’s Spell
Premise:
You’re ready for a fun day at the mall with your best friend Sid, but your mom forces you to take Joanie, your annoying little sister, with you. I don’t even have any siblings, R.L. Stine. Stop forcing this on me.
Anyway, Joanie runs off the second you step foot in the mall, and you and Sid manage to track her to the latest and coolest store in town – The Magic Shop. It turns out that both your best friend and your sister are the kinds of people who can’t keep their hands off of store merchandise. Joanie’s immediately using the trick finger guillotine. Sid decides to slap on a pair of handcuffs because that’s definitely a good idea and a surefire way to make a good first impression on the shop owner – a cape-wearing guy with a thin mustache. He introduces himself as The Magician. Give him a break. All of the good magician names were taken. Instead of doing the proper thing and kicking you and your friends out of the store, The Magician disappears in a puff of smoke.
You leave the shop only to realize that Sid’s still wearing the magic handcuffs, and they’re getting tighter. That’s okay, though. Joanie made off with The Magic Book of Spells. Your shoplifting sister’s solution to Sid’s situation is to try a spell from the stolen book. But is that such a good idea?!
Nelson’s Story:
Of course, reading a spell from a book stolen from a shop owned by a disappearing magician with a terribly uncreative name isn’t a good idea – especially not when I’ve got a perfectly good clubhouse full of perfectly good tools at home. Despite my best efforts, the cuffs wouldn’t budge. Sid is an idiot. At least Joanie stole a potentially useful book. My best friend decided it’d be hilarious to slap on a pair of handcuffs. It’s a good thing there wasn’t a taser in the store. I finally gave up after trying to smash the lock with a hammer, but then Sid fell down and the cuffs magically opened. Turns out that falling down was the secret to getting them off. What a weird trick.
We decided to head back to the mall and return the Magic Book of Spells, but we were intercepted by Larry Green and his two pals, DJ and Buddy. They’re the school bullies. After a brief struggle that caused a few pages to be torn out of the book, they managed to snatch it away before running off to “the old chemical factory” where they all hang out like preteen versions of Clarence Boddicker’s gang in Robocop.
After a brief discussion over whether or not we should all go dumpster diving, we decided to try and sneak in the factory and snag the book when Larry and pals weren’t looking. Unfortunately, my attempt to crawl through the window found me face to face with a snarling German Shephard. Joanie offered to try and calm the dog down with a spell from one of the pages that got torn out of the book, and I figured “why not?” I like dogs, but there’d been a decided lack of magical hijinks up to that point in the story. It was time to see what The Amazing Stine had up his sleeve.
The dog went from snarling canine to playful puppy right before our eyes. Hooray! We made it through the window, and, for absolutely no reason in the world, I suggested that Joanie read the spell again. Then Sid and I turned into dogs because the spell Joanie was reading was the “Spell to Turn One into a Playful Dog.” Dammit, R.L. You got me. At least dogs are better than bats.
Amanda’s Story:
I wound up with Nelson’s exact story, so I decided to do it all over again. To think, I was happy being a good doggo. Dang.
My first alternate decision was to strangle my sister for playing with the guillotine. It’s a bit extreme, but I was up for it until R. L. Stine told me to cool my jets, go back, and choose again.
This brought me back to figuring out how to get the cuffs off Sid. I opted for the magical way, which is unfortunate since I happen to know all the kid has to do is fall down.
The magic book was written in a non-English language. I read a bit of something in the back not knowing what was going to happen. Smart. The result was booming thunder and cracks spreading through the mall. The floor opened up, and we fell down into the Earth…but not before I shoved the magic book in my pants.
Joanie, Sid, and I found ourselves in a black room with a coffin and a velvet curtain. Out of nowhere, three men in red tights summersaulted in and started juggling balls of fire. One of them decided I looked as though I might want to juggle as well, so he threw me a fireball. The book asked if I could juggle, and I figured that book me could probably pull it off. The men and I threw the balls back and forth for a bit before they informed me that the magician wanted his book back, or he’d be eating us for dinner. Oh, why couldn’t I have just been a good boy like my beloved dog George. One of the jugglers removed Sid’s cuffs with a “trick,” and let us know that The Magician was on his way before disappearing in a puff of smoke.
My next decision was a bit frustrating. Even though I knew it was probably best to give the book back, I was forced to hide it in either the coffin, a bird cage, or a fish tank. You can’t see through a coffin, so that was my best bet. We managed to get it in the coffin before a crow swept into the room and transformed into The Magician. We told him that we didn’t have the book only for him to inform us that we wouldn’t like him when he was angry.
He flipped us upside down with magic and shook us like saltshakers to see if we had the book. He let us know that, if we didn’t give it back, we would join his collection….of shrunken heads! I thought we were going be eaten, but whatever…
The velvet curtain blew open to reveal twelve shrunken heads, and the magician disappeared. Joanie suggested that we give the book back, but the decision fell on me. I’d been wanting to return this book for quite some time, but, when we opened the coffin, it was gone. We heard something, so we hid in the coffin…which turned into some sort of magical chute that sent us racing downwards.
We hit bottom and found the book, but, before Joanie could get her hands on it, a masked man appeared. Joanie managed to get the book after we introduced ourselves as his new assistants, but we were forced to help with one of his tricks – the cabinet of swords or the old sawed-in-half bit.
I chose to help with the cabinet of swords because being stabbed in several places might be better than being sawed in half. The Magician hypnotized Joanie and Sid, but, somehow, I managed to do the trick successfully. Unfortunately, the masked man wouldn’t tell us how to escape this place. Instead, we’d have to ask Mr. Knowledge or Mrs. Cardsharp.
We had to climb a rope to get to Mr. Knowledge, but it turned out to be a waste of time when Mr. Knowledge proved to be totally useless. With no other choice, we make our way to Mrs. Cardsharp.
Cardsharp was waiting for us to join Mr. Lucky Luck, Ms. Nine Lives, and Mr. Rambler Gambler at a table for a game of cards. Mr. Luck suggested a game of Kaboobie, but I countered with a game of Draw. The book actually tells you to go get a deck of cards, shuffle them, and then draw one card – keeping it face down before turning to the next page. You find out that you need an Ace to beat Mr. Rambler Gambler’s King of Spades. I lost.
Joanie, Sid, I were forced to polish Rambler’s rhinestone suit. There were over 4,000 rhinestones that needed polishing, and we were doomed to become shrunken heads whenever we finished this tedious task. I also assume that the magician will eat our bodies for dinner. I still wish I could have remained a good doggo, but alas.
The number one lesson of Under the Magician’s Spell is a simple but valuable one: sometimes it’s best to just take the animal transformation ending and be done with it.
I always knew there were sequels to Prom Night – a standard fare 80s slasher that featured Jamie Lee Curtis, an annoyingly catchy song, and an elaborate dance routine – I just never had enough interest in the original to look into the follow-ups. I don’t know what compelled me to check out Prom Night II recently. Maybe it was random. Maybe it was fate. Actually, scratch the maybes. It was fate. I thought I loved horror. I thought I loved silly horror. How could I have known what I was missing out on? I hate to admit that it’s true, but I went all these years without Mary Lou.
Mary Lou Maloney was a rebel without a cause. Someone who dared to challenge antiquated, rigid social norms. Someone who went to confession just to brag to the priest about her sexual escapades while scrawling her phone number in the booth. And she loved every minute of it. She’s named the 1957 Hamilton High Prom Queen on the same night that her boyfriend, Billy (played in adult form by Michael Ironside!) catches her cheating on him while simultaneously guzzling whiskey out of a flask. Sadly, her fun comes to an abrupt halt when the jilted ex sets her on fire with a misplaced stink bomb right in the middle of her crowning ceremony. So much for seeing her at the party, Richter. The queen goes up in flames because the whole “stop, drop, and roll” thing seemingly didn’t exist in the 50s and because no one, literally no one, in a packed gym does a damn thing about the burning girl onstage.
Thirty years go by, and the same kid who got away with roasting his date has grown up to become the school principal. While that may seem strange, it’s totally normal compared to the school’s decision to load up all of Mary Lou’s prom gear in a trunk and store it in the “prop closet.” I wish my school had a prop closet. Anyway, Mary Lou’s vengeful spirit is freed from her trunk tomb when Vicki Carpenter opens it in search of a dress for her senior prom because her mother refused to buy her one. Fortunately for her, the best prom dresses are always locked away in the prop closet.
From there, the spirit of the barbecued prom queen wreaks havoc on Hamilton – hanging a girl with her stylish royal cape and tormenting Vicki with an evil rocking horse so terrifying that it is capable of driving you mad if you stare at it too long. Poor Vicki winds up being pulled into a chalkboard/swimming pool portal – allowing Mary Lou to possess her. This leads to even more crazy antics like naked locker room stalking and making out with her dad while her overly religious mother looks on and wishes that she’d just sprung for a new prom dress earlier in the movie because, if she had, her daughter never would have opened the damn prop trunk to begin with. Vicki Lou also keeps the hellish rocking horse. And lovingly caresses it.
Vicki Lou rigs the prom queen vote in an effort to fulfill the moment of glory she was so cruelly denied back in ‘57, but she’s gunned down in the middle of the crowning ceremony by Principal Ironside. That’s right. Hamilton High’s principal opens fire on a high school senior just as she’s being named queen of the prom. Before anyone has a chance to process what they’ve just witnessed, the actual Mary Lou emerges from Vicki’s corpse and goes Carrie on the gymnasium. Ironically enough, her murderous rampage is more justified than Carrie’s. Carrie just got some blood spilled on her. Mary Lou’s boyfriend got mad and set her on fire.
Prom Night II’s conclusion has zero regard for logic or coherency. Billy crowns and kisses Mary Lou – giving her what she was robbed of by his vengeful teenaged angst all those years ago. This…makes her happy, and she goes away. You’ve got to appreciate those evil spirits you can satisfy with a kiss. Vicki reappears in the costume trunk that started all this mess, leaving one to wonder what happened to the corpse in the gym, but, hey, it’s a happy ending…..until Billy reveals that he’s been possessed by Mary Lou and drives off with Vicki and her boyfriend in the back of his car in an ending ripped straight out of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The movie’s ending isn’t all that’s Elm Street-esque. Hello Mary Lou borrowed several elements from the man of everyone’s dreams – from the death by fire to the surreal, nightmarish imagery, and a possession plot that makes me giggle when I picture how the Walsh family would’ve handled Vicki’s otherworldly ordeal.
If Prom Night II is the Nightmare on Elm Street of the series, then Prom Night III: The Last Kiss is the Freddy’s Dead. And, like Freddy’s Dead, it’s absolutely glorious.
The movie kicks off with Mary Lou as a member of the “forced to dance on hot coals for all eternity” chain gang in Hell. This seems a little cruel and unusual, but, then again, that rocking horse had the potential to undo the fabric of reality. Anyway, thanks to her trusty nail file, Hamilton High’s favorite student escapes her ironic afterlife punishment and returns to her old stomping grounds ready to creatively murder students and faculty for the fun of it. There’s no revenge plot here. Mary Lou just likes killing people. She also wants a new boyfriend because she really just wants to be loved (and who can blame her considering her last relationship), and, after a chance hookup with a dejected senior named Alex, the gymnasium monarch becomes his ride or die – with a big emphasis on “die.”
The Last Kiss goes hard with the comedy, and it’s all the better for it. If a science teacher being murdered by ice-cream cones isn’t must-see material for you, then I’m guessing you’re one of those people who drinks non-alcoholic beer and decaffeinated coffee. Ms. Maloney manifesting a killer ice-cream stand in the middle of Mr. Walker’s Biology lab to pay him back for giving Alex an F is enough to elevate a mere movie into Film territory, but, when she drags the school guidance counselor into a beauty shop and dumps battery acid on her head, you’ve got a genuine cinematic masterpiece on your hands. Oddly enough, a ghost girlfriend comes with perks and benefits that Sarah, Alex’s living girlfriend, can’t compete with. Not only do Alex’s grades improve, Mary Lou manages to somehow make him faster and better at football. Then she handles the team bully by throwing him a football that turns into a big corkscrew midair and leaves the kid literally screwed to the goal post. Did I mention that she’s wearing a football uniform when she does this? ‘Cause she is.
For some reason, Alex thinks the best way of handling the mounting corpses is burying them in the football field, but the whole thing blows up in his face when he makes the tragic mistake of breaking things off with his ghostly gal. The bodies are discovered, and things go rapidly downhill for the unappreciative, gaslighting chauvinist. Mary Lou even appears on television as a reporter on the local news just to inform Alex that he’s taking the blame for the murders right before he’s carted off to prison. Then, Prison Guard Mary Lou helps him escape. This movie is amazing.
Everything culminates in a conclusion so insane that you’ll be thinking about it and wondering why a blowtorch is an effective weapon against the armies of Hell for the next five years. Alex agrees to join Mary Lou for all eternity, and she takes him to an evil version of Hamilton High. Sarah follows to try and set him free and get rid of her undead competition with the aforementioned Holy Blowtorch, but her efforts ultimately don’t pay off. There’s a quick victory fakeout, and the seemingly reunited couple hotwire a car and try to drive it out of the underworld, but, just as they realize that they’re trapped in 1957, Mary Lou pops up in the back seat and kills Sarah. Not everyone has what it takes to be queen.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #6 – Beware of the Purple Peanut Butter
Premise:
Your parents went to Europe for a “business trip,” so you’re off to spend the summer with your Uncle Harvey and Aunt Fiona because getting shipped off to stay with relatives while your parents party it up in another country is a harsh but firm Goosebumps rule. Your aunt and uncle aren’t so bad, but your two cousins are nightmares spawned from the depths of Hell. Your older cousin Barney is obsessed with “pounding” you at every turn, and your younger cousin Dora is a perpetual pest who lives to tell on you for the slightest indiscretions. In a nutshell, you’re spending the summer with the classic Stine mean older sibling and annoying younger sibling at the same time. Fun!
The ball gets rolling pretty quickly in this one. Your aunt and uncle give you the obligatory “don’t go in this room!” warning about the basement before they head into town – leaving you to play Cousin Barney’s unique brand of hide and seek. He gets to pound you if he finds you! Will you break the only house rule and hide in the basement? Of course you will! The book doesn’t have time for a goody-two shoes who follows the rules. You realize that you haven’t eaten since breakfast, but, conveniently enough, there’s an old refrigerator in the basement that contains a jar of purple peanut butter and a slice of chocolate cake baked by the fine folks at Effy’s Bakery in Midvale. So what’s it gonna be, the cake or the peanut butter?
Nelson’s Story:
I’m not really into sticking my hand into a jar of purple stuff and eating it. A spoon or a box of crackers would have been nice, but, with neither of these things available, I went for the cake. I mean, I was supposed to beware the purple peanut butter, right? Anyway, the cake tasted bad, but what can you expect from mysterious basement food you find in a mysterious basement fridge? Nothing seemed amiss at first. In fact, things seemed to be going really well for me. I backed Barney down with just one punch, scared Dora away with a shout that was much louder than I intended, and managed to hit my first ever homerun. For some reason, I no longer knew my own strength. Hmmmmm……
My homerun led to brief encounter with the police because they arrived mere moments after the baseball crashed through a window. Cops in this town have nothing to do. Oddly enough, they congratulated me and headed off – making me wonder why they bothered showing up at all. Anyway, it was pretty neat being strong, but I couldn’t deny that something was a little off after my toes burst through my shoes. Of course, the cake made me grow. What a neat idea that I’ve never encountered in a book with R.L. Stine’s name on the cover. For some reason, I decided that going back to the basement fridge and eating the jar of purple peanut butter was the best way of solving my plight. And by “I decided,” I mean that the book gave me no option. I ate the perplexingly purple peanut paste hoping that it would somehow restore me to my normal size. But guess what? It only made matters worse. I started growing uncontrollably and barely made it out the basement window before I became a modern day Goliath.
So I was a giant, and everyone was terrified of me. For some reason, they insisted I was an alien – which I didn’t’ really appreciate all that much. Can’t people tell the difference between a gargantuan and an extraterrestrial? Buncha ignorant imbeciles. Anyway, I wound up being pursued by the cops and decided that the best place to hide out was the town circus. I got mistaken for The Amazing Strongo and was forced to hit the stage and show off my superhuman strength by picking up Dodo the elephant. I managed to pull off this amazing feat because the book asked me if I could do five pushups, and, by golly, I can! The elephant act came to an abrupt halt when someone in the crowd recognized me as “the alien,” and the chase was back on. I was desperate. There was only one thing I could do. It was time to hit up Effy’s Bakery in Midvale.
My newfound elephant pal held off the cops while I hit the road for Midvale. I met the kindly old Effy at the bakery, and she revealed that the chocolate cake of doom was intended for a customer who wanted to grow, but they moved away and it wound up in the fridge in my aunt and uncle’s basement. Or something. Luckily for me, Effy was willing to whip up a new cake that would restore me to my original size and put this whole nightmare behind me. Unluckily for me, she made the cake in a dumpster because a super big guy like me needed a super big cake. If you need a super big cake, you’ve got to make it in a dumpster. It’s a rule.
I ate my dumpster cake, shrank to my original size, and headed home with an honest to goodness happy ending. Of course I had to be hospitalized the next day thanks to eating out of a garbage receptacle, but at least no one thought I was an alien anymore.
Amanda’s Story:
I chose the purple goop, which tasted like peanut butter and chocolate and was very satisfying. However, my enjoyment was short-lived. Dora found me and demanded I play with her, or she’d tell on me. I’ve never minded playing with children, but if she was going to be rude about it, it was going to be a hard no. She called her brother to get back at me, so to avoid my pounding I hid in the refrigerator. And that is where my life ended. In a refrigerator.
Well, there you have it. I had a fun adventure running from cops, joining the circus, and eating cake out of the trash, but my wife wound up dying in a refrigerator before she got ten pages into her adventure. These books offered kids a harsh lesson about the unforgiving nature of the world around them. They may seem silly, but I can assure you my wife isn’t going to be trying to hide in any refrigerators anytime soon. Thanks, R.L, Stine!
Funnily enough, Purple Peanut Butter is one of the Goosebumps titles that’s 100% confirmed to have been ghostwritten – which means that someone knew the most surefire way to imitate Stine was to write a story about eating things that make kids grow or shrink.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #5 – Night in Werewolf Woods
Premise:
It’s summer vacation, and that means one thing: it’s time for the annual family trip to WoodsWorld – a cabin community deep, deep in the woods. Right next to Deep Woods Lake. Because we’re deep, deep in the woods. Ordinarily, this is the highlight of your year, but, for some reason, your parents decided to ruin the vacation by bringing their best friends, the Morrises, along for the trip. That means you get to hang out with undisputed king of nerds, Todd. He collects pewter figures and brings a tin box full of them everywhere he goes. You hate Todd because you aren’t a nerd. You don’t care for pewter figurines because you’re too cool for that, and you just know that all the other kids at WoodsWorld are going to hate him. They might even think you’re a nerd by association, and you can’t have that. Especially not when the big Kid’s Only Campfire is tonight! Only the coolest kids go to the Kid’s Only Campfire.
Todd falls victim to the Jess, Buck, and Sharky Murphy the minute he gets out of the car. The Murphy brothers are the bullying redheads of WoodsWorld. Guess why they call him Sharky? ‘Cause “getting into a fight with Sharky is like trying to survive a shark attack.” The other two brothers don’t have cool names. Or serve any real purpose to the story. The Murphys steal the tin of precious pewters and run off, and it’s up to you to try and get it back. You head to the big campfire just in time to for Sharky’s spooooky story about the Wolves of WoodsWorld. You’ve got to be careful when the full moon is out because the kid you thought was your friend might just be a hungry werewolf! After the story, you overhear the Murphys discussing their super cool “bury a box of pewter figures in the woods” prank. You’ve got the info you need, but it’s getting late, and there’s a full moon. Are you going to risk the impending werewolf threat and search tonight, or wait until tomorrow?!
Nelson’s Story:
It’s a werewolf book, so I figured I better go all in and not risk Stine making fun of my cowardice before turning me into a bird. The first thing I discovered was a poem taped to a rock warning me that I only had until midnight to find the stolen figures. Did the Murphy brothers leave this for me? They didn’t exactly seem like fans of poetry, but how else would they know I was out looking for my nerdy friend’s nerdy box of nerdiness? Anyway, Todd immediately appeared and joined the search, and we wandered into a cave. We could hear horrible howling and growling and other wolf noises coming from deep inside, so we decided to make like trees and get out of there. Unfortunately, this was when I learned the horrible secret of WoodsWorld: the light of the full moon has the power to transform anyone into a werewolf…..even Todd! Or was he a werewolf the whole time? The book doesn’t say.
I managed to tackle Todd and drive him back into the shadows before he went full-wolf on me, but the horrible howling we’d heard in the cave was getting closer and closer. What could I do? How would we survive? Thanks to correctly answering a question about The Werewolf of Fever Swamp, I realized that the best solution to being howled at is howling right back. And running. And falling into a bottomless pit while a pack of werewolves closed in on us.
As Todd and I came to terms with an eternity of plummeting into darkness, we managed to be rescued by a friendly pterodactyl. They’re the dolphins of bottomless pits. The Jurassic hero dropped us off on a ledge and flew away, and, before we had a chance to process what just happened, we found ourselves facing a big elevator operated by a guy who started to turn into a werewolf the second we got on-board. I had one shot to press one of the two elevator buttons: STOP or GO? I figured I might as well press GO and keep up with the adventurous choices because, hey, maybe I’d get to see a T-Rex.
This choice brought my wacky adventure to a pretty satisfactory conclusion. The book complimented my bravery in the face of unyielding horror before revealing that the button I’d pressed was a button on my alarm clock! It was alllllll a dream. My parents and I were headed to WoodsWorld that morning….without Todd! Hooray! Instead of learning a valuable lesson about how nerdy kids are people too, I got to have an awesome vacation without poor Todd and his pewter figures getting in the way.
Amanda’s Story:
I decided to wait until the morning to look for Todd’s box, but, of course, the werewolves sent a rock through our window with a poem attached. If we didn’t look for the box tonight, it’d be too late.
We met up with Lauren Woods. Her parents own WoodsWorld – which means that WoodsWorld is in the woods and owned by the Woods family. Neat. It didn’t take long for Lauren to stumble over some piles of freshly dug dirt. We realized that someone recently buried something, so we dug up two boxes that looked a lot like Todd’s. They weren’t his, but they did seem interesting. One was labeled “SUPER-STRENGTH BOX” and the other “SMARTS BOX.” Before we had a chance to look inside, a werewolf burst through a wall of bushes, and I only had time to open one. Super-strength seemed helpful in this case.
The box was full of “ordinary-looking Oat O’s cereal.” I ate a handful and developed some serious muscle mass that ripped my shirt. I was able to lift the werewolf with one finger and send him flying somewhere far away into the woods. Unfortunately, a troll showed up, and I no longer trust trolls. So, there’s no way this was going to be a good thing.
He let us know that he was the Master of the Boxes, and that I was now his slave. I tried to hit him with a branch, but he turned me back to my normal size and ordered me back to my cabin. Todd begged me not to leave them, but the troll started mocking him and being silly by changing sizes and jumping around. Little did he know that I was only pretending to head back to the cabin. I’d secretly stuffed the off-brand Cheerios in my ears, so I couldn’t hear my troll master’s orders. I managed to trap him in a box by taking advantage of his size-changing.
Then, the Murphys appeared, and I offered them some of my cereal. They were super excited to accept the cereal since it was “free.” I don’t think I’d be too willing to take someone’s random Night Cheerios, but I too enjoy free stuff. They packed on their muscle, and Sharky hoisted Todd up in the air. I told the bullies that they could have Todd and the super cereal. Sharky put Todd down as I handed over the box, and the three of us got out there.
From a distance, we could hear the troll asking the Murphy’s where they buried Todd’s pewter figures. He wanted to be the master of Todd’s box, too. Jeez. It turned out that the Murphy’s didn’t bury the pewter figures. They’d stashed them in a tree! The troll shrank the brothers and made his way up the tree to get Todd’s tin, but we managed to shake the box loose before he could get it. Todd grabbed the box, and we ran back to our cabin…knowing full well that troll would be coming for us.
After the disappointing Dr. Eeek affair, Night in Werewolf Woods was absolutely reinvigorating. The fact that a story promising lycanthropic lunacy managed to work in underground dinosaurs and a troll who loves boxes is a testament to how much fun these books can be. And we both made it through the whole thing without being transformed into anything. That’s a big win.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #4 – The Deadly Experiments of Dr. Eeek
Premise:
Your mom is a scientist – which immediately raises all sorts of red flags because we all know what kinds of kooky things can happen when scientists show up in R.L. Stine books. She could be turning herself into a plant or engineering giant fish in a bizarre plot to end world hunger. Unfortunately, you’ve got no idea what your mother does. All you know is that she’s just started a new job at Eeek Laboratories, and you and your best friend Sam are there to meet her because she promised to take you guys to the movies. Even though a receptionist with weird eyebrows asks you to take a seat in the waiting room, you and Sam can’t bear the wait and decide to check the place out as soon as the only adult in the room leaves. Of course, you can’t go exploring on an empty stomach. While making a quick stop at the snack machine, a chimpanzee shows up and insists that you pick out his favorite candy bar. Then he eats it. So much for your quick snack. After feeding the chimp, he motions for you to follow him. But will you?!
Nelson’s Story:
How could I not follow a friendly monkey? He led Sam and I to a lab where we met one of Dr. Eeek’s assistants, Professor Yzark. After formally introducing me to Oscar, the candy bar munching chimp, Yzark was eager to show us the super cool experiments everyone was working on and led us to a windowed room full of chimps solving puzzles and playing video games and doing all sorts of impressive things. He offered to let us go in and check it out, but this seemed like a horrible idea that would lead to awful consequences. I wasn’t about to risk turning into a chimpanzee after last week’s adventure as a vampire bat. So I made up an excuse to get us out of there. Surprisingly enough, Yzark was totally fine with this. As a matter of fact, it was for the best because my mom actually *just* called with instructions for us to take Oscar home and wait for “someone” to come pick him up. I guess the trip to the movies was a clever façade.
Back at the house, Oscar threw pineapple yogurt all over the walls and swung from our chandeliers. Yeah. We’ve got chandeliers. When your mom is a scientist, luxuries like pineapple yogurt and living room chandeliers are commonplace. Sam and I chased the chimp around the house until we were interrupted by a knock at the door. I was greeted by a shirtless teenager with “sun streaked brown hair and a broad, tanned chest.” Oscar eagerly leapt into his arms, and the duo hopped in a jeep and sped off. As they left, I managed to catch a glimpse of a vanity license plate with one simple word that explained everything while explaining nothing at all: T A R Z A N.
Amanda’s Story:
My story was very similar to Nelson’s. I chose to go in the room with the chimpanzees while at the same time hoping they wouldn’t rip my face off. As soon as Sam and I entered, Oscar locked us in. The chimps quit playing video games and reading and stared at us. Then we saw Oscar in the other room put on a lab coat and give the professor a treat for being a good boy. The professor then got into a cage for his nap time. Then, I just happened to notice that there were other cages with people in them too, but I somehow didn’t notice that before. I’m not a very observant kid. I never heard from or saw my mom again. I have been doomed to have my brain studied by chimpanzees, but at least I can look forward to getting a treat every now and again.
Sadly enough, neither one of us managed to get much of a story this time around. I gave it another go and realized that the crucial decision of the book is whether or not you want to follow Oscar or go back to the waiting room. Following Oscar results in one of the two insta-endings Amanda and I got – depending on whether or not you agree to go in the room with the chimps. I considered going back and trying to score a longer story for this week’s article, but that’d be cheating, and we don’t believe in cheating at DoubtFire…..even if Stine kinda/sorta jipped us this time around. These books usually shame you for making the “safe” choice. To quote a legendary salesman of propane and propane accessories: Dirty pool, mister. Dirty pool.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #3 – Trapped in Bat Wing Hall
Premise:
You’ve moved to a new town and a new school, and no one in your class likes you or even notices you. It’s a shame, too, because “you know you’re cool,” and, by golly, you are! This town is full of a bunch of snobby kids. Just when you’re ready to commit to a life of splendid isolation, you meet Nick – your neighbor who lives in a house that you’re absolutely sure was abandoned when you moved in. That’s not odd or suspicious at all, and there’s no sense in thinking about it too much because Nick invites you to join the Horror Club!
The club meets every Friday night in Bat Wing Hall – a creepy old mansion once owned by a creepy old guy named Professor Krupnik – where they tell spine-chilling stories and play spooky games. Unfortunately, you show up on game night and find yourself roped into a competition called “The Hunt.” It sounds sinister, but it’s really just a scavenger hunt for scary stuff. One of the club members warns you to get out while you still can, but you disregard her because you’re a strangely judgmental kid who thinks she’s gross when you see her chewing on her hair. The club splits into two teams, and it’s up to YOU which one to join…Red or Blue?
Nelson’s Story:
Of course I picked blue. It’s Cobra Commander’s favorite color. This put me on a team with a “beautiful girl with long blond hair and green eyes” named Lara. She must be some kind of looker for Stine to pull out an adjective like “beautiful” when “pretty” is his usual go-to word for attractive girls. I didn’t get a chance to get to know Lara, though, because the team immediately directed me to a cemetery on the property and insisted that I had to do my scavenging there since I was the new kid in the club.
I discovered Professor Krupnik’s crypt. There was a big stone ring that I needed to turn to get inside, but there was a warning chiseled on it: “Who turns the stone will grow bat bones.” I knew exactly where this was going, but it was too late to turn back. I went inside and found absolutely nothing. At all. Just bats. I left to find the rest of my team only to find that they’d all gone home and abandoned me. They probably realized what an overly critical creep I was.
I went home, went to bed, and woke up as a bat. I knew it. You got me, R.L. Stine. You turned me into an animal. A bat, at that. Great.
I flew back to the crypt in search of a cure – passing up any opportunity to try and ask people for help because I’ve read enough Goosebumps books to know that it won’t turn out well for me. Back in the crypt, my super cool bat senses spotted a crack in the floor with another inscription: “Who enters here will be –.” The last part of the writing is missing, but, hey, it probably said “transformed back into a judgy twelve-year-old.” I dove in and began plummeting helplessly through darkness. I was a kid again, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. Being able to fly is a handy way to avoid falling to your death, after all.
I landed on a big patch of moss in a swampy area and followed a path that led me to a big building….the Monster Library!! Inside, I was greeted by shelf after shelf packed full of monstrous books like Dracula, Frankenstein, and….Godzilla! Before I got the chance to take in the news that Godzilla was apparently based on a novel, an eight-foot-tall, two-headed literary scholar walked up to me. After a brief conversation, he offered to help me find my way home, but only after I finished reading him every book in the library! That’ll take….FOREVER!!!!
But at least I’ll get a chance to read that Godzilla book.
Amanda’s Story:
I chose red even though I seemed to dislike the whole team. I even made a mental note that one of my teammates stank. Still, I wasn’t ready to abandon the people who invited me into their club.
Once the Blue Team left, my team started ripping off their faces to reveal they were really monsters in kid costumes. They told me I had to participate in the scavenger hunt and find a huge list of stuff before midnight or I’d turn into a monster myself.
I decided to look upstairs first, but I ended up stuck in a force field until 1 minute after midnight. I never got to find out what sort of monster I turned into which was a little disappointing, but not quite as disappointing as my adventure being cut short thanks to a totally random force field.
That’s just the nature of these books. I got a fun adventure full of twists, turns, and the revelation that monsters just love reading, but Amanda managed to find herself in one of the series’ notorious, completely unfair abrupt endings. The Horror Club is the worst club ever.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #2 – Tick Tock, You’re Dead
Premise:
Your family decides to spend Christmas vacation in New York City! Unfortunately, your family is absolutely awful. Mom and Dad’s idea of a good time consists of hanging out in the Museum of Natural History, and your little brother Denny’s favorite phrase is “You’re not the boss of me!” He says this a lot because your parents insist on asking you to keep an eye on him even though Denny couldn’t give the slightest bit of a damn about anything you say.
You’re forced to chase your little brother through the museum. In the process, you meet Dr. Peebles and his super amazing time travel experiment. He mistakes you for a volunteer, slaps a weird looking stopwatch – the “chronometer” around your neck, and tells you to get ready for some super amazing adventures through time! Just when you’re about to play Marty McFly to Peeble’s Doc Brown, Denny shows up, jumps in the time machine, and disappears. Now you’ve got to go after him before he “disappears into timelessness forever!” But did Denny travel to the past or the future?
Nelson’s Story:
The back of the book mentioned something about dealing with dinosaurs, and that was more than enough to make my decision for me. I went to the future. I’m not going to risk R.L. Stine putting me in his kooky version of Jurassic Park.
As soon as I arrived, I was faced with another big decision: Did I want to head into the mysterious looking Future City or explore a mundane and decidedly non-futuristic New York? New York seemed safer, and I caught a glimpse of some kid who looked like Denny running around, so the choice was clear. I quickly found out that I’d only been transported *one day* into the future – which is actually pretty neat, but my book counterpart was annoyed with it because I was apparently going through my angsty “I hate everything” phase. If only time travel could have solved that..
It didn’t take long for me to find my Future Family walking down the sidewalk. From there, I was helplessly embroiled in a plot right out of Back to the Future II. After watching the fam get run down by an out of control truck, I traveled back in time to try and prevent the accident while simultaneously trying to avoid bumping into my Future Family and creating a rift in the space-time continuum. Somehow I managed to pull it off and reunite with Denny in the process. I felt proud. I was cruising towards that sweet, sweet Good Ending with nary an obstacle in sight. All I needed to do was grab Denny and get back to Dr. Peebles. But, when I chose to grab the kid and go, I grabbed Future Denny AND Present Denny because Stine isn’t about to let me off that easy. Now I’ve got two bratty brothers that I’m not the boss of. Maybe I should have tried my luck with the dinosaurs….
Amanda’s Story:
I chose to travel to the past because I knew Nelson would pick the future. My options were to run towards a knight on a white horse or towards a dinosaur – depending on which way I thought my little brother had gone. I didn’t particualy care for Denny, so I in no way looked forward to finding the little asshole. As much as I’d have loved to pet a dinosaur, I doubted that would be an option in this adventure, so I went towards the knight.
There was a castle with a drawbridge and a moat – which I enjoyed – but the spear wielding knight seemed “pretty serious.” I could either jump in the moat to escape or try and talk to the guy. I decided to be social against my better judgment. I told the knight I was from the future and searching for my little brother. He was super unhelpful and just told me I had to fight him to get into the castle. Surely, my little asshole brother hadn’t fought this guy. If I lost, I’d be fed to the King’s crocodiles!
I convinced the knight to use clubs for a round of baseball with apples – with the result dependent on a coin toss. I won! I love winning and all, but the knight took the loss pretty hard, jumped into the moat, and fed himself to the crocodiles. Before he was fully eaten he yelled, “Beware of the Lair!” I’m worried about the whole darn place at this point. Suicide by crocodiles was enough for me.
When I entered the castle, I heard screaming. I could either check it out or go back. I decided to see if it was Denny. I came to a room where I could go through one of two doors, the Lair or the Throne Room. Neither one sounded like a good option, but I heeded the words of the suicidal knight and avoided the Lair. Of course the king was in the Throne Room. He immediately accused me of being a spy until I spotted Denny – who was now the king’s adopted son. Reasonable enough. I knew I didn’t want to find the little shit.
Denny and the king agreed that I should be boiled in oil. So….fried? I begged Denny to stop the madness, but he apparently hated me more than I hated him and told his new dad to boil me. I was about to be fried until my hand hit a button on the chronometer. I made it back to the lab, but without my brother. That’s for the best. Of course my parents are going to blame me for their negligence, but this one was definitely on them.
What a book. Suicidal knights, your family being “flattened like pancakes” by a drunken truck driver, and a homicidal little brother determined to boil you alive. Tick Tock, You’re Dead is an extremely appropriate title for this merciless, soulless, and murderous caper.
Give Yourself Goosebumps offered readers an experience they didn’t know they wanted but couldn’t possibly pass up: the opportunity to live a Goosebumps story! This spinoff choose-your-adventure series gave YOU, yes you, the chance to encounter purple peanut butter, beastly babysitters, and knights in screaming armor who can’t wait for you to make a bad choice!
Amanda and I will read each book separately and report back with all the grisly, gruesome, and grimy details of our adventures.
Give Yourself Goosebumps #1 –Escape from the Carnival of Horrors
Premise:
In Escape from the Carnival of Horrors, you and your two bickering best friends – Patty and Brad – decide to sneak into an abandoned carnival at night because what could go wrong? Of course, you get a chance to *not* sneak into the carnival, but that makes you wimpier than Brad, and no one wants to be wimpier than Brad.
You’re immediately caught by an imposing guy named Uncle Al – who may or may not be the same Uncle Al from Welcome to Camp Nightmare. I like to believe that he is, even if that would make him an alien since Camp Nightmare is really a training ground for missions to Earth. Regardless, one thing is absolutely certain: he’s big. He’s Al, and he’s the head Uncle in charge at the Carnival of Horrors.
Fortunately for everyone involved, Uncle Al is excited that you’ve broken in because it’s the perfect opportunity for the place to get a test run before opening day. You, Patty, and Brad get a whole carnival to explore, and it’s up to *you* what everyone does first….the rollercoaster or the boardwalk?
Nelson’s Story:
I opted for the rollercoaster, but I sent Patty and Brad on their way the second I got the opportunity to check out the House of Horrors. I fell off a bridge on the way and somehow managed to escape by choosing to flap my arms like wings. From there, it was onto the House of Horrors which actually turned out to be a House of Mirrors that can literally trap you in an infinite loop of page turning if you take a wrong turn. That’s pretty ruthless. Fortunately for me, I made all the right turns because I’m cool like that and would never flip ahead to make sure I’m making the right decision. From there, I fought some robots and learned the terrifying truth of the Carnival of Horrors: it’s a ghost carnival that appears in a different place every night – inviting kids to join them and trapping them forever!!
My ONLY chance was to get out of the place before midnight. I caught up with Patty and Brad and jumped on the Halloween Express to ride the tracks to freedom and safety. As soon as the exit was in sight, a ghost ate me because the book asked if I had good reflexes, and I said yes. Clearly, R.L. Stine thought I was lying. Sure, he was right, but how did he know? Oh, and now I’m a ghost, too, because that’s what happens when you get eaten by a ghost.
Amanda’s Story:
I went with the rollercoaster as well, and I kept going until my part of the coaster broke off. I found myself alone in a tunnel which was a nice break from those “friends.” I decided to get out of my seat and find my way out, but I was hit with burning slime. Luckily, a nice enough red eyed dwarf offered to guide me out of the tunnel. I decided to go with him, as it would be rude not to. Who cares if he looks “evil?” The dwarf took off running, and I chose to follow him. Thank goodness book me can run.
The dwarf directed me to two doors before vanishing in a puff of smoke. One door promised “Danger,” while the other offered up “Big Danger.” Oh, the options. I picked Danger because Big Danger is just too much. I wound up on the dreaded Doom Slide. I’ve never read One Day at Horrorland, so I had to chance it and choose my slide number at random. Somehow, I survived and reunited with my friends, but this wasn’t such a great thing. We’d been sewn together and transformed into Siamese triplets for the Freak Show. As someone who loves her alone time, this was an absolutely terrifying ending.
Well, there you have it. I managed to become a ghost, and my poor wife wound up in a Freak Show permanently attached to Patty and Brad forever and ever. These books offer “over 20 different scary endings,” and I think it’s pretty safe to say that Amanda wound up getting the scariest one of all. Being a ghost isn’t all that bad, but a Siamese triplet is sheer nightmare fuel.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #62 – Monster Blood IV
Well, here we are – the final book of the original series. Monster Blood IV is a perfect way to wrap things up. Slappy may be Goosebumps’ signature villain, but the signature saga award goes to the gruesome goo. Evan Ross and Andy – Don’t Call Her Andrea – are the most frequently recurring duo in the series. They’re the prototypical boy/girl non-sibling duo that the vast majority of the stories utilize. Weirdly enough, Andy doesn’t get a last name. Ever. Even Cousin Kermit, who doesn’t show up until Monster Blood III, gets a last name.
Anyway, Monster Blood IV isn’t a very highly regarded title, so I went into it with low expectations. Those expectations were blown away. You’ve got to be drinking some amazingly refreshing blue raspberry Haterade to have a problem with this book. Either that or you hate Gremlins, and hating Gremlins is an issue in and of itself that should be addressed as soon as possible. How anyone can make it through over sixty Goosebumps titles and decide to cry foul when Stine offers up a story about hairy, blue blobs that multiply when they get wet is beyond me. No one becomes a giant in this one. How is that not a win?
Of course, every Monster Blood sequel suffers from the same thing: the characters all have a vague, at best, memory of what happened in the previous book. Conan “The Barbarian” Barber should be terrified of Evan after his favorite target became a giant and stuck him in a tree, but he’s still stretching Evan’s sweater sleeve and yanking him around by the ear in Part IV. The boy definitely earns his Bully Card. As usual, Mr. and Mrs. Ross are out of town. Evan is supposed to be taking care of Kermit – but mostly just gets beaten up and blamed for things he didn’t do – and Andy manages to find a canister of Monster Blood right about the time he’s fed up and ready to take sweet revenge. The slime is blue this time around, and, once it’s out of the can, it forms itself into a little slug creature with eyes. Like the ones on the cover! It seems harmless and cute at first, but it splits into another creature when it gets wet, and that creature splits into another creature that splits into another creature. You get the picture. The slugs also get meaner as they multiply. Hairier, too – courtesy of Kermit’s hair growing formula.
Things quickly get out of the control, and it’s not long before the furry blue meanies start attacking. First they go for the dog, and then they all converge on the three kids, covering them and seemingly dooming them to a gooey grave forever. All of a sudden, the blobs turn on one another. They’ve gotten so mean that they can’t work together, and a fight breaks out. The blue baddies destroy themselves, and the kids are saved. Before the book ends, a scientist named Professor Crane shows up asking about his “blue guys.” He explains that the whole ordeal was the result of a ten-year-long, fifty-million-dollar attempt to create an invincible underwater army. What a neat idea! Anyway, the dejected Professor tosses the empty can into Conan’s yard before riding off. Does this mean that the green Monster Blood is the result of a military experiment, too? What about Aunt Kathryn and Sarabeth? Once again, Stine leaves us with more questions than answers. Oh, and it turns out that the can Professor Crane tossed out wasn’t empty, and Conan ate some of the blue goo, and now there’s a whole bunch of Conans in the back yard. Stay gold, R.L. Stine. Stay gold.
The blue blobs weren’t grinning anymore. Low growls came out of their scowling mouths.
“They were so cute,” Andy said softly. “But now they’re turning mean.”
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #61 – I Live In Your Basement!
There’s not another Goosebumps book like I Live in Your Basement!, and I absolutely love it. The story unfolds like a DTV Hellraiser flick – with reality shifting from chapter to chapter and zero indication of what’s really real and what’s a dream induced by a softball bat to the head.
Marco’s mother is so overprotective that she sees pencil sharpening as a dangerous endeavor capable of blinding her beloved son – which is a nice change of pace after over sixty books chockfull of adults so careless that their Camp Crystal Lake Counselor applications were rejected with extreme prejudice. Mom’s worries turn out to be entirely justified after Marco sneaks out of the house to play softball and winds up fracturing his skull thanks to his super athletic classmate with atrociously terrible aim, Gwynnie. That happens in the first chapter, and, from there, I Live in Your Basement! becomes a no-holds-barred free-for-all. Marco wakes up with a big bandage on his head and gets a creepy phone call from a guy who introduces himself as Keith. It seems that Keith lives in the basement, and he’s real anxious for Marco to get better and take care of him. When Marco tries to tell his mother about this disconcerting discussion, she points out that there’s not a phone in the room!! What’s going on here?!
Things only get weirder. Keith keeps up with his cryptic communications, and Marco can’t resist the urge to share every detail with his mother – who, of course, doesn’t believe him and suspects that he’s having complications from his head injury. He goes back to school and learns that he has no memory of the weeks he spent in the hospital recovering from his ill-fated foray into sports. The family physician, Dr. Bailey, recommends a routine brain removal and inspection to get to the bottom of the amnesia and hallucinations, and Mom is completely on board for this totally standard procedure. As if that wasn’t enough, Marco even gets chased home from school by a bat-wielding Gwynnie! She stops by his house later and explains that she was only running after Marco with a bat in her hand to apologize. What a hilarious misunderstanding. He tries to confide in her about Kooky Keith and his weird “I live in the basement, take care of me!” messages, but she thinks he’s just trying to scare her. Unwilling to let our concussed crusader get away with such chicanery, Gwynnie pulls her insides out of her mouth and turns into a monstrous version of Nickelodeon’s Inside Out Boy. That’ll show him. Marco screams, loses consciousness, and wakes up in the hospital to discover that Gwynnie is actually his younger sister and not even responsible for hitting him with the bat. Before that big news can sink in, Dr. Bailey arrives and starts pulling Marco’s tongue out of his mouth as if the poor kid was Freddy Krueger’s stunt double in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Or does he?!
I Live in Your Basement! is full of such wondrous wackiness that the whole deal with Keith is essentially a boring distraction. I didn’t care about the kid living in the basement…not when the main character is facing a “stop seeing things or our family doctor is going to take your brain out” ultimatum. We eventually find out that Marco was actually Keith the whole time, and that Keith is actually an inside out blob monster thingy who lives in the basement and got hit with a softball bat when he snuck out to play with the human kids. Or something. It’s another one of those “the main character was actually a monster/ghost/vampire/werewolf” deals that Stine throws in when he’s got a deadline. It’s an incredibly underwhelming ending to an otherwise amazingly fun book, and I hated it. But I loved the book. Funny how things work out.
Dr. Bailey tugged hard on my tongue. It slid out of my mouth, as long as a hot dog.
I struggled to squirm away. But he held my chest down with one hand while he pulled my tongue with the other.
Pulled… pulled…
My tongue was a yard long. It drooped down the side of the bed.
Dr. Bailey reached deeper into my mouth and pulled. Pulled out more tongue. More…
Yard after yard. My tongue curled on the floor, wet and pink.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #60 – Werewolf Skin
Werewolf Skin is the book that happens after R.L. Stine spends a weekend watching The X-Files. It still follows the standard Goosebumps formula because there’s no sense in fixing what isn’t broken, but the plot revolving around werewolves who shed their skin feels like something Agent Mulder would have taken a keen interest in.
Alex loves photography, and he’s planning to be a werewolf for Halloween. Normally these two things wouldn’t be related, but things aren’t normal in the world of Goosebumps! Alex’s parents are away on business so important that they’re forced to enroll him in a new school and send him off to live with his Uncle Colin and Aunt Marta because things like this never, ever go wrong. Especially since Colin and Marta just so happen to be professional photographers, and the town just so happens to be called Wolf Creek. What a great place for trick-or-treating in a werewolf costume! This idea horrifies his aunt and uncle so badly that they nearly have a car accident, and absolutely every kid at school, even the obligatory pair of bullies, hates Alex’s costume plans. Lycanthropy is no joke in the town of Wolf Creek. Hmmmm….
Werewolf Skin manages to make it all the way until Chapter 3 before the “kind of cute” tights-wearing girl shows up. Hannah lives next door, and Alex really digs her “real low and husky” voice. She shows him around his new school where the teachers give entire lectures on the basics of Goosebumps’ werewolf mythology. Transformations happen nightly; there’s no cure, and you’ve got to shed your skin every night and hide it away until the next night. So that’s where the title comes from!
Uncle Colin and Aunt Marta’s number one rule is to stay away from the Marling house. The Marlings are the mean old couple next door. They hate kids, and they hate people, and Alex grows to suspect they’re werewolves after seeing animal footprints leading to the house, people climbing out of windows, and all sorts of other spooky and suspicious things. In a shocking twist that no one could possibly see coming, it turns out that the Marlings don’t even exist. Uncle Colin and Aunt Marta are the real werewolves. The whole spiel about the grouchy neighbors was just a way to keep their nosy nephew away from the abandoned house they hide their skins in. What is it with adults hiding horrifying secrets agreeing to let kids they barely know come and live with them? And why would the house next door be the ideal hiding spot?
Alex and Hannah decide that the best way of handling the situation is to steal the stashed skins and wear them for themselves. After all, Marta and Colin can’t transform without them. Surprisingly, this plan is a smashing success. You can’t be a werewolf if you can’t put your fur on, and Alex’s aunt and uncle are cured forever. Breaking the “unbreakable” curse wasn’t such a chore after all. Everyone is happy. The day is saved, and Alex got to have the best Halloween ever…. until Hannah reveals that she’s also a werewolf and bites him!
On one hand, the cure for werewolfism is absurdly simple – especially after Alex’s teacher makes such a big deal about how hopelessly permanent the condition is. On the other hand, the whole skin shedding bit is pretty cool and definitely a whole lot less goofy than some of the other things Stine has added to horror’s most iconic creatures. I’m looking at you, Vampire Breath. I don’t want to, but I am.
“Oh, that’s right. Halloween’s only a couple days off,” Aunt Marta said, glancing at my uncle. She turned back to me. “What do you want to be for Halloween, Alex?”
I didn’t have to think about it. I’d already decided back home.
“A werewolf,” I told her.
“NO!” she screamed.
Uncle Colin also let out a cry.
The van plowed through a stop sign. I flew off the seat and hit the door hard. And stared helplessly through the bouncing windshield—as we swerved into the path of a roaring truck.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #59 – The Haunted School
The Haunted School is a highly regarded series title, and I was anxious to check it out. By now, I’ve got such a tolerance for these books that you’d have to tell me Vince Russo was secretly writing them to disappoint me, but this one’s reputation is well-earned. The Haunted School is an impressively creepy and pretty damned disturbing story that ends on a downer and leaves you wondering what could have possibly motivated Stine to be such a vicious bastard. Maybe this was around the time Scholastic was alleging that he employed ghostwriters?
Tommy Frazer’s father gets remarried and decides to move to brand new town, Bell Valley, right after the wedding – forcing his son to kick off the school year in a new town at a new school with a new mom. Tommy manages to befriend a really annoying practical joker named Ben and a “pretty awesome looking” girl named Thalia. She’s also new to the school, and she loves putting on makeup over and over again all day long. I wonder if there might be some hidden, spoooooooky reason she’s doing this? Surely not.
Anyway, the big school dance is coming up, and Ben and Thalia and Tommy all volunteer to join the Dance Decorations Committee. When they run out of paint for the banner they’re working on, Tommy gets lost trying to find it and winds up in a classroom full of unpainted, life sized statues of children – the Lost Class of 1947. Bell Valley Middle’s first class of twenty-five kids all abruptly vanished into thin air –never to be seen again. So, of course, the best response to such a tragedy is to commission a bunch of creepy statues of the missing students and put them all in a classroom for poor unsuspecting new kids to stumble on.
On the night of the dance, Tommy and Ben try to take an elevator to the art room to get some tape to fix a banner. They get stuck, and the elevator starts to move sideways before the doors open and the two boys find themselves in a colorless classroom full of colorless kids. The kids explain that they’re the missing Class of ’47 and welcome the two newcomers to the fun-filled land of Grayworld – a weird Purgatory type place that mirrors Bell Valley. The vanished kids explain that they were all transported here when the evil Mr. Chameleon used an evil camera to take an evil class picture. Now, just like them, Ben and Tommy are stuck and doomed to gradually turn gray and hang out in a classroom with the others. They’re not supposed to try to leave the school because the rest of the class all roam the streets as mindless savages.
The dimensionally transplanted duo are desperate to get home and decide to take their chances with the mindless savages outside – which is definitely a more proactive way of approaching the problem than the others’ “let’s sit in this classroom forever” solution. Unfortunately, the crazed children manage to capture our two heroes and haul them off to a big, steaming pool of goo called “The Black Pit.” For some reason, these folks like to drink the goo and rub it on their faces and all sorts of other kooky things. They’re also really excited to toss Tommy and Ben in the pit, but the two are rescued at the last minute when the passive portion of the class shows up. Tommy fends the mob off with a flame from the lucky lighter his grandfather gave him because the goo-drinkers don’t like the color of the fire.
When everyone gets back to the classroom, the elevator doors abruptly open, and Thalia steps out. The doors slam shut behind her before anyone can get in because that would be too easy, and Thalia’s got some explaining to do. She’s one of the gray kids, too! That’s why she constantly puts on makeup! She managed to escape into the world of color and light when she used the last smidge of remaining red in her lipstick to draw a window, but she had a miserable time and is happy to be back. She’s also happy to draw a window for Tommy and Ben to go home because it’s the 29th chapter of a Goosebumps book. The two boys make it back to the dance just in time for a big group picture – courtesy of Mr. Chameleon!
The principal nodded. “Yes. Just about fifty years ago. There were twenty-five kids in the school. And one day… one day, they all disappeared.”
“Huh?” Startled by her words, I dropped the paint cans to the floor.
“They vanished, Tommy,” Mrs. Borden continued, turning her gaze to the statues. “Vanished into thin air. One minute they were here in school. The next minute, they were gone… forever. Never seen again.”
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #58 – Deep Trouble II
It’s been awhile since the original Deep Trouble underwhelmed and frustrated me with its bait-and-switch cover art. I went in expecting killer sharks and got a mermaid instead. My expectations weren’t too high for the follow-up – even if the cover suggested that the story may have a Gooseumps-ized Piranha. I learned my lesson the first time around. And, surprise surprise, there were no razor-toothed tropical fish in the story. As a matter of fact, that’s actually a goldfish on the cover. Regardless, Deep Trouble II surprised me. It has a lot in common with Return of the Mummy in that it’s sort of a course correcting sequel. The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb was no mummy story, and the first Deep Trouble was a far cry from horror on the high seas. This one still didn’t give me the R.L. Stine Jaws rip-off I’ve been waiting for, but a giant jellyfish manages to (temporarily) eat Billy Deep’s annoying little sister, and that’s a pretty big win.
It’s been a year since Billy and Sheena Deep joined up with their insane uncle, Dr. D, to rescue a mermaid from pirates, and they’re super-excited about spending another summer with him aboard his research boat, the Cassandra. Billy is eager for some adventure because he’s, “One year older. One year wiser. One year tougher.” His little sister is eager for some pranks because she’s a younger sibling written by R.L. Stine. She terrifies her older brother at every turn – making him think that he’s being eaten by an octopus, tricking him into believing that there’s a decapitated head in his beloved goldfish bowl, and even breaking out the old “fake shark fin” trick for good measure. Billy falls for everything because Billy never learns.
Dr. D and the kids start to notice that the ocean is inexplicably full of giant fish – like a monstrous minnow and the aforementioned Sheena-eating jellyfish. Even Billy’s pet snail grows to gigantic proportions and nearly capsizes the boat. Pets that grow into giants….where have I seen that before? Anyway, the Deep family go on to discover that all these kooky sea creatures are the product of the experiments of the demented Dr. Ritter. Oversized fish means oversized seafood, and that means no more world hunger. Unless you don’t like seafood, of course. I don’t like seafood, so Dr. Ritter’s experiment does nothing for me. It would condemn me to starvation. Awesome plan, Ritter.
The Deeps get tossed off their boat and wind up spending the night on a life raft that washes up on a deserted island. Before things go full Swiss Family Robinson, a team of heroic dolphins shows up to save the day and take our heroes back to their ship – which Dr. Ritter and his crew have commandeered. The good guys get captured immediately. Then, Dr. Ritter reveals that he’s genetically manipulated plankton in order to pull off the whole giant fish plan, but….the special plankton’s growing effect only works on ocean dwellers. It turns people into fish!! And Dr. Ritter plans to force Billy to drink a vial of it! Oh no!
Billy drinks Ritter’s concoction with no ill effects. The astounded mad marine biologist decides that the best thing to do in this situation is to take a shot of the stuff himself….only to promptly turn into a fish. He hops off the boat and swims away. It turns out that Billy swapped the plankton for tea in preparation for his latest prank. Sheena’s shocked. She was going to play the same prank! Then, for no reason at all, she grabs a bottle and drinks from it. But did she accidentally drink the plankton? Is Sheena about to grow gills? The world may never know.
I splashed across the water, racing toward the pink blob. It writhed and wriggled with my sister inside it.
What is it? I wondered. What can it be?
And then, as I pulled myself closer, I knew what it was.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #57 – My Best Friend Is Invisible
It’s hard to believe that I’ve only got five more original series books to cover. I feel a lot like I do when I watch Ghostbusters and Mr. Stay Puft shows up. I’m ecstatic for the grand finale and desperately trying to ignore the part of me that’s sad to see everything come to an end. Sadly, My Best Friend Is Invisible is a far cry from the pre-chosen form of The Destructor. It’s another one of those Goosebumps stories that would have been better off as a fifteen-page adventure in one of the Tales to Give You Goosebumps collections. Stretching this business out for twenty-nine chapters causes the plot to tediously drag as we slog our way to the been-there-done-that twist ending.
Sammy loves science fiction and horror and all of the cool things life has to offer, even though his parents and his little brother think stuff like that is stupid because they’re real scientists who deal with facts instead of fantasy. So, when Sammy starts insisting that there’s an invisible kid named Brent hanging out in his bedroom, everyone thinks he’s crazy. Unfortunately for our sci-fi loving guy, Brent really is invisible, and he’s absolutely determined to be Sammy’s best friend. No matter what. He tries to accomplish this by terrorizing the family cat, making a mess in his newfound pal’s bedroom, and even attempting to help him win a race by picking him up and throwing him in front of the other competitors. Brent is terrible at being a best friend.
My Best Friend is Invisible is one of those Goosebumps sagas that features the main character being totally oblivious to the fact that they sound like a raving lunatic. The more Sammy insists he’s got an invisible friend, the more he troubles his science loving family. He probably would have been better off claiming that the piano in the house is haunted or that a puppet is trying to enslave him. Arguing with someone who isn’t there and insisting that the invisible kid is responsible for eating half a pizza before dinner is a great way to raise some pretty big red flags, but Sammy is convinced that if he can just prove Brent is real that everything will be fine – even though absolutely every attempt he makes to prove he’s right only backfires. Eventually, Mom and Dad are ready to send the kid to a psychiatrist, and that’s when the grand finale comes in. Desperate to save himself from near-certain institutionalization, Sammy grabs his dad’s “Molecule Detector” gizmo and uses to it to finally reveal his concealed comrade – only to be horrified by what he sees. Brent’s real alright, but he’s only got one head and no antennae. Brent’s one of those endangered human thingamajigs! The newly exposed boy explains that his parents turned him invisible to try and protect him from the monstrous beings that now rule the Earth. Sammy wants to keep him as a pet, but his dad declares that Brent will have to go to the zoo because they’re better-equipped for human-care.
So yeah, it’s another “the narrator was really a monster!” endings that Stine seems to fall back on more and more frequently in these later entries. It kinda seems like R.L. Stine uses that as his “I don’t know how else to wrap this up” card, but that idea is just as ridiculous as an invisible kid eating half a pizza before dinner.
I stared at the pizza slice. Stared as it floated in midair.
I watched as it was chewed up. Bite by bite.
“Tell me who you are!” I shouted. “You’re really scaring me!”
Another bite disappeared from the floating slice of pizza. And another.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #56 – The Curse of Camp Cold Lake
The Curse of Camp Cold Lake is the last of the original series’ camp stories. The book’s cover is one of the best in the series. It suggests that you’re in for a terrifying tale of marshmallow roasting gone wrong and vengeful water ghosts rising from the depths. Sadly, there’s no water ghost to be found, and the narrator’s narcissistic antics are truly disturbing.
Sarah isn’t too excited about spending her summer swimming in the Camp Cold Lake’s icy waters. Her brother Aaron is ecstatic about it, but he’s not an important part of the plot and only shows up to offer occasional moral support by telling his sister what a great time he’s having. Sarah isn’t the first miserable and perpetually unfortunate Goosebumps main character we’ve ever seen, but she’s easily the most unlikable. She’s self-centered and whiny, and she ultimately decides that pretending to drown is the ticket to popularity and acceptance.
Things get off to a bad start the second Sarah walks in her assigned cabin and demands to have the bottom bunk even though Briana, of her three bunkmates, claimed the bed before she ever showed up. Surprisingly enough, the woe-is-me attitude and incessant complaining don’t earn her any friends. The girls drop a garden snake down her shirt, and she pays them back by putting spiders in their beds and gets them sent to the infirmary. Way to up the ante, Sarah.
Camp Cold Lake operates with the buddy system strictly enforced, but no one wants to be buddies with spider-wielding Sarah. She’s forced to bear the indignation of being assigned an unwilling buddy by Counselor Liz – enforcer of safety rules and recipient of cat calls and whistles everywhere she goes thanks to her super-hotness. That’s when our narrator finally decides to play the tried and true “Pretend to Drown” card to earn the sympathy and adulation of her fellow campers. Only she gets more than she bargained for when she stays under too long, loses consciousness, and has a vision of a ghostly camper named Della – who insists that Sarah is her new “buddy.”
Liz rescues and resuscitates Sarah, but Della keeps showing up whenever the little attention attractor goes near the water – causing her to believe that Della must have drowned years ago and is the reason behind the camp’s safety rules and buddy system. This makes life at camp more miserable than ever because no one other than poor Sarah can see Della. She goes from being the camp complainer to the camp lunatic. Worst. Summer. Ever. Fed up with the whole world and everything in it, Sarah makes a plan to go through the woods and escape. That’s when Della shows up and gives us the real deal: She didn’t drown. She was bitten by a snake in the woods! The same woods that she’s lured Sarah into by making her afraid of the water! And now Sarah can be her buddy…forever!!
All of a sudden, Briana the Bunkmate shows up. She explains that Della pulled the same routine on her last summer, so she’s back to put a stop to it. This weirdly causes Della to disappear. Then, Briana lays down the real twist: She’s a ghost too! Just, you know, a ghost everyone can see. Not like Della. At all. Ghost Briana wants a buddy, and Sarah is it!
The final twist is absolute nonsense, but I still enjoyed The Curse of Camp Cold Lake. It feels a lot like a callback to the earlier books, and it even packs in some questionable content with the main character deciding to fake her death and Stine taking the time to detail Liz’s sexy outfits. The 90s were the wild west of children’s entertainment, and Stine was Jesse James.
“Someone has to trade beds with me!” I cried. I didn’t mean to sound so shrill. But I was really upset.
Before they could answer, the cabin door swung open. A sandy-haired young guy in a dark green camp T-shirt poked his head in.
“I’m Richard,” he said. “I’m the boss guy, the head dude. Everything okay in here?”
“No!” I cried. I couldn’t stop myself. I was just so nervous and unhappy. “I can’t sleep in this bunk!” I told him. “I don’t want to be near the window. And I need to sleep on the bottom.”
I could see that the other girls were shocked by my outburst.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #55 – The Blob That Ate Everyone
There’s a really good Stephen King short story called “Word Processor of the Gods.” It’s the tale of a man who unwittingly discovers that anything he writes comes to fruition. In the end, the reality-controlling writer uses his power to give himself the life he’s always wanted – at the expense of doing away with his current family. The Blob That Ate Everyone takes this cool concept and does absolutely nothing interesting with it whatsoever. I wanted to like this book. I was excited to get through it, but, as it turns out, I was even more excited to put it back on the shelf. Cool cover art aside, The Blob That Ate Everyone is a lot like Go Eat Worms! and Deep Trouble; I didn’t like it, and I don’t anticipate reading it again.
Zackie Beauchamp likes to write short stories about pink blobs that eat his two friends – Alex Larocci and Adam Levine Levin. Yes, his name is Zackie. If two friends sounds like one-too-many for a Goosebumps main character, don’t worry. Alex is the nice girl who’s a friend but not a girlfriend, but Adam is a different story. He’s basically your standard Goosebumps bully who our narrator somehow likes despite the fact that he’s never all that nice or friendly. Adam takes every opportunity to mock, laugh at, and play pranks on Zackie. He constantly derides his buddy’s writing pursuits while Alex plays the supportive friend which makes one wonder why Zackie doesn’t just punch Adam in the nose.
The plot gets rolling when Alex and Zackie discover that the local antique store has burned down after being struck by lightning. Inside, the would-be wordsmith finds an old typewriter that would be just perfect for typing his scary stories on……even though he just got a fancy new laser printer that churns out a whopping 8-pages a minute. He picks up the typewriter and is immediately electrocuted. He’s okay, though. The shop owner shows up. She scolds the kids for messing around, but gives Zackie the typewriter because we’ve got a scary story to get to! After a tough day at school, Alex shows up at the Beauchamp house to hang out and watch her friend type up his latest story. The second he types the opening line – “It was a dark and stormy night” – the sky darkens and a thunderous downpour begins. Zackie makes the wind howl and the power go out before he starts to believe that his typewriter possesses reality-altering powers. He puts this theory to the test when he makes Adam appear on the front doorstep. Even though the kid has no idea why or how he’s there, Adam still relentlessly picks on Zackie and laughs at all the mystical typewriter hoopla. He heads home, but not before using the typewriter and inadvertently conjuring up a Blob Monster right in poor Zackie’s closet. What a great friend.
Zackie chalks the whole night up to a hilarious coincidence and uses his old school word processor to finish up his spooky story – not realizing that there’s a big, nasty Blob in his closet just waiting for an opportunity to go through the neighborhood eating anything and everything in its path. Adam gets eaten, and Zackie and Alex desperately try to undo the disastrous story-come-to-life. Before he gets the chance to write a new ending, the monster eats the typewriter and seemingly dooms the whole town. But then, Zackie suddenly realizes that he doesn’t need an old typewriter: He has the power! Armed with a series of big, tall wishes, Zackie undoes all the damage, and everyone lives happily ever after. Before you ask how Adam managed to successfully use the typewriter earlier in the book if Zackie was the one really responsible for the shenanigans, the whole thing is revealed to actually be a story written by…a Blob Monster! Way to work around those plot holes, Stine!
“Well? Did you like my story?”
The pink Blob Monster neatened the pages he had just read and set them down on the desk. He turned to his friend, a green-skinned Blob Monster.
“Did you just write that?” the green monster asked.
The pink Blob Monster gurgled with pride. “Yes. Did you enjoy it?”
“I did,” his friend replied. “Thank you for reading it to me. It’s very exciting. Very well written. What do you call it?”
“I call it ‘Attack of the Humans’,” the Blob Monster replied. “Did you really like it?”
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #54 – Don’t Go To Sleep!
Don’t Go To Sleep! is a lot of fun. It’s a little like The Cuckoo Clock of Doom – only twelve-year-old Matt Amsterdam is caught in a reality warp instead of a time warp. Matt’s revolving realities are triggered whenever he falls asleep, so it’s a real mess, and the only thing he can do about it is hope he’ll eventually wake up in his original life.
The whole ordeal kicks off when Matt decides that his tiny bedroom is too cluttered for comfort. He begs to move into the much larger guest room, but his mom adamantly refuses because she prioritizes her guests’ comfort over her youngest son’s. His older brother and sister relentlessly pick on him, and he’s forced to help his mother make dinner. How’s a kid supposed to catch a break? Fed up, Matt sneaks into the forbidden guest room to sleep the night away. Of all the sneaky things children are capable of, claiming the guest bed without permission doesn’t seem like a big deal. Unfortunately for Matt – and the whole world – sleeping in the guest bed is a super big deal!
Matt wakes up to discover that he’s suddenly sixteen-years-old, and his older brother and sister are now his younger brother and sister! They still pick on him, though. And, wouldn’t you know it, he hates high school. He’s too young to understand the Math and reading assignments. This embarrassing ineptitude in the classroom gets our young Quantum Leaper sent to the principal’s office. By lunchtime, he decides to flee campus and meets a friendly twelve-year-old named Lacie in the process. The next day, Matt’s back to his original age, but he has an entirely different family and goes to a strange school that starts serving lunch at 8:30am. He bumps into Lacie again and gets chased by two mean looking kids in black.
Over and over again, Matt goes to sleep and wakes up in increasingly bizarre situations, but, whether he’s a circus performer or a car-eating lizard monster, he keeps bumping into Lacie and getting chased by the Kids in Black. The traveling trio eventually catch our hero and lay down the hard facts: They’re the Reality Police. Matt’s fallen through “a hole in reality,” and Lacie and her cohorts are here to set things right- by putting Matt to sleep forever. Did I mention that the other two kids are named Bruce and Wayne?
When it comes to enforcing the stability of the universe, the Reality Police are as effective as the Haddonfield PD. All Matt has to do to escape his plight is go to sleep. Since he’s in an R.L. Stine book, he finds himself as a squirrel and, ultimately, “a really, really chubby kid. A real blimp.” Fat Matt manages to sneak back in his old bedroom to catch some Reality Sorting Z’s. The next morning, all is finally right with the world. Matt’s mom even has an awesome surprise for him. All of his stuff has been moved to his new bedroom – the guestroom! Oh nooooo!
What could I do? I had no idea what was going on. I went for the foolproof escape.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
Everybody laughed except the teacher. He rolled his eyes.
“Go ahead,” he said. “And stop by the principal’s office on your way back.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” the teacher said. “You’ve got a date with the principal. Now get out of my class.”
I jumped up and ran out of the room. Man! High-school teachers were mean!
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #53 – Chicken Chicken
Chicken Chicken is terrifying. The cover pretty much gives you the score; the main character turns into a chicken. It’s a lot like Why I’m Afraid of Bees but without all the fun facts about bees. Nevertheless, Chicken Chicken offers up a healthy dose of disturbing along with a grand finale that manages to take two of Stine’s favorite plotlines – transforming kids and growing/shrinking kids – and combine them to teach readers with an important lesson.
Crystal and Cole live in the tiny farming town of Goshen Falls because their parents hated living in New York and abruptly decided to fulfill their lifelong dream of abandoning their big city computer programming jobs, moving to the country, and becoming chicken farmers. And guess what? Crystal and Cole hate chickens. They don’t like Goshen Falls too much either. There’s nothing to do except join the other kids in their never ending series of pranks on Vanessa – the local weirdo who wears all black and lives in a cabin with her big, black cat. Cole, Crystal, and their ruthless, delinquent friends fill the poor lady’s mailbox up with water even though they all think she’s a witch, and you wouldn’t think they’d want to provoke her. When the kids flee the scene, Vanessa manages to catch sight of the C siblings.
Later, the chicken farming duo and their good buddy Anthony (who isn’t all that important to the plot so don’t worry about him) bump into Vanessa in town and cause her to drop her groceries. Anthony quickly apologizes and runs away, but Crystal and Cole stick around long enough for Vanessa to whisper “Chicken Chicken” to them before heading off. And, wouldn’t you know it, the two kids start growing feathers and involuntarily clucking and eating chicken feed over the course of the next few days. Cole winds up ruining his big solo in the school chorus when he clucks his way through it, and Crystal has an absolutely horrifying experience trying to play basketball while losing the use of her arms and legs. Despite all this, Crystal and Cole don’t bother doing much to solve their plight even though they’re waking up each morning picking the feathers off of each other, and Crystal’s lips are hardening and slowly turning into a big ole beak.
By the time the kids’ knees are starting to bend the opposite way and they can barely take two steps without lowering their heads to the ground in search of food, they decide that maybe they should beg Vanessa to reconsider her cruel punishment. So they break into her house when she’s not home and rifle through her books desperately in search for a spell to save them. Way to get on her good side, kids. One spell turns them into gigantic birds, and the next one shrinks them down into tiny chicks. Vanessa returns before her cat can eat them, but she sadly reveals that it’s too late to undo the transformation. Resigned to life as a chicken, Crystal hops on a typewriter and composes a message apologizing for all the trouble. Luckily for her and her brother, it turns out that Vanessa is a big fan of manners. If the kids had just apologized the other day, everything would have been fine! She happily reverses the spell – even though she just insisted that this was impossible. Lying apparently doesn’t count as bad manners. Life is back to normal right up until Cole burps, and the two kids laugh about it. You’re supposed to say “Excuse me.” Vanessa whispers “Pig pig,” and that’s the end.
Good manners are important, and R.L. Stine wasn’t shy about writing body horror for kids. It may seem a little silly, but Crystal being forced to flee a basketball game because she can’t bend her knees or move without bobbing her head is absolutely terrifying and is going to mess up my dreams for years to come.
The action moved to our opponents’ basket, and I ran down court. My head bobbed up and down. I realized I was running stiff-legged. My knees no longer bent!
The ball came sailing toward me.
I couldn’t catch it. My hands were tucked under my armpits. My elbows were poked out like wings.
I let out a loud cluck as the ball bounced off my shoulder.
In the immortal words of the good people at Silver Shamrock: “It’s almost time, kids. It’s almost time!”
Halloween is officially upon us. There’s no escaping. Naysayers and October Grinches are like terrified teens who trip over piles of leaves while trying to run from the inevitable. The Festival of Samhain is going down, and I couldn’t be more excited if you told me that what the world thought was Halloween Ends was really an elaborate trick and that we’ll be treated with the actual movie on the 31st.
But you can’t Corey Cunningham my holiday – not when I can fall back on the tried and true, the titles I keep coming back to every year, the Official October Essentials….Part 2!!!
Scars of Dracula – It’s an objective fact that you’re not going to get a better portrayal of Count Dracula than Christopher Lee’s. He looked fantastic; he sounded cool, and his eyes turned red when he was being really evil. Beyond the superficial stuff, Lee brought a presence to the role that isn’t likely to ever be matched. He didn’t even have to utter a word in Dracula: Prince of Darkness – a movie that is regarded as one of Hammer Horror’s quintessential titles.
Scars of Dracula wasn’t so warmly received. It’s got cheaper production values and veers more towards 70s slasher schlock than the refined, beautifully shot classics that preceded it. There’s also a laughably bad puppet that slightly resembles a bat and makes way too many appearances. Scars injected a healthy dose of sex and gore into Hammer’s Dracula movies. The result is a movie that almost feels like a weird Transylvanian version of Friday the 13th, and I absolutely love it for that. Scars offers viewers a well-balanced horror feast with a little spookiness, a dash of corniness, a sizable helping of sex and violence, and a Dracula so powerful that God, Himself, is forced to step in and handle the situation. And there’s a bat puppet guaranteed to put smiles on faces across the globe.
House on Haunted Hill – There aren’t many movies featuring Vincent Price that I don’t love, but I’m Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance levels of insane for this movie. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the opening. The perpetually terrified house owner and Vincent Price appear on the screen as giant talking heads to give the audience a brief description of the “only real haunted house in the world” and introduce the characters and “whoever spends the whole night wins $10,000” plot.
Things get rolling from there. There’s a pool of acid in the basement that, despite being used in a murder, remains untouched and is surprisingly well-kept. Someone puts a Halloween decoration on wheels to create a hilariously horrifying ghost/witch thing that rolls across the room. There’s a staged suicide attempt, and, in my favorite part of the movie, Vincent Price puppeteers a skeleton that shoves his wife into her well-earned corrosive crypt. Price’s relationship with his scheming spouse gives him a chance to slip into the verbally vicious bastard role he plays so well, but, in a fun twist, he winds up emerging as the mean spirited, murderous hero of the story – clearly inspiring his role as Vincent Van Ghoul in 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo.
The Adventures of Pete and Pete: “Halloweenie” – Pete and Pete was a show that fearlessly tackled kid issues that needed tackling. Abolishing bedtimes, extended Christmases, and having the perfect sick day were matters of serious consequence. But nothing hit quite as close to home as the show’s Halloween special. Little Pete is determined to break Wellsville’s trick-or-treating record – 374 houses in one night. Unfortunately, Big Pete is at war with the dawning realization that he’s getting too old for the festivities and is obsessed with the potential consequences of being caught and labeled a “Halloweenie” by a nefarious gang of jack-o’-lantern wearing Halloween Haters calling themselves the Pumpkin Eaters. Ordinarily, I’m a big fan of pumpkinheaded bad guys, but not when they’re out to sully the sanctity of All Hallow’s Eve.
Outgrowing Halloween is a frightening prospect when you’re a kid who’s too young to have developed the all-important “I don’t care what anyone thinks” mindset, and it’s even harder to handle when you start to realize that you’re legitimately going to get grounded two weeks before the big day. Every. Single. Year. You’re tragically susceptible to shame and peer pressure – particularly when you’re surrounded by a mob of Halloween blasphemers who insist that you smash a jack-o’-lantern to show your disdain for the sacred holiday. That’s why a character like Little Pete was a beacon of hope for so many. He was wise beyond his years; he had a forearm tattoo before he was ten, and he dared challenge the shackles of society for the betterment of kids, small town superheroes, and teenaged trick-or-treaters everywhere.
Trick ‘r Treat – I wish I could say that I’ve been a fan of this movie since it came out. I love anthology movies – especially when the stories interconnect with each other. A Halloween-themed Cat’s Eye is the sort of thing that my dreams are made of. I’d have loved to have told all of my friends and associates and the random people I say weird things to in Wal-Mart how awesome this movie is and how they should reevaluate their priorities to ensure that watching Trick ‘r Treat is at the top of the list. But I can’t. It’s not fair. Before my wife got me to watch it, I never knew Trick ‘r Treat existed. I don’t know how something like that could have happened. It’s an injustice. I should have been contacted the second a movie featuring weaponized candy became a reality, and I’m still mad that I wasn’t. Well, maybe “perturbed” is a better word. It’s tough to be mad when you’re watching Sookie Stackhouse rip her flesh off and transform into a werewolf before eating the evil, kid-poisoning high school principal and bringing a formal end to his reign of terror.
And then, of course, there’s Sam – the burlap sack-wearing tyke in orange footie pajamas. By now, my love of folks with jack-o’-lanterns for heads is well known, but Sam’s a little different. He’s no jack-o’-lantern; underneath the mask, the guy is a living, breathing pumpkin, and he’s not about to watch his holiday get disrespected by empty-headed imbeciles with no regard for tradition. Sam administers a harsh – but fair – justice upon anyone who dares bend the official Rules of Halloween and makes it clear that Jack Skellington needs to sit his ass down because Sam is the real Pumpkin King. Sorry Billy Corgan. I didn’t mean it. At all. That said…..
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness – The Smashing Pumpkins’ magnum opus – the best album of the 90s, the alt-rock version of The Wall, the record that changed my life forever and ever – came out a mere seven days before the 31st. Is there really a more appropriate band to listen to in October? Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is an untouchable masterpiece. Go in a dark room, put on x.y.u., and crank the speakers up. If you don’t feel that the forces of Hell are threatening to converge on you during that outro, then I can only assume that you’re in with the Pumpkin Eaters, and I’ll need to ask you politely, but firmly, to leave.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #52 – How I Learned to Fly
How I Learned to Fly is widely regarded as one of the best titles in the series, and I definitely agree with that. It’s not very Goosebumps-y, but, then again, you’re going to find a lot more stories about rapidly growing and/or shrinking kids than goblins and ghouls and other supernatural terrors in these books.
Jack Johnson has sort of a thing for his friend Mia – “the cutest girl at Malibu Middle School.” Unfortunately, his attempts to impress her are always one-upped by his “friend” and neighbor, Wilson – who *also* has sort of a thing for Mia. Jack draws a superhero, but Wilson draws a whole team of superheroes. Jack struggles to save Mrs. Green’s cat from a tree and winds up taking a plunge – only for Wilson to immediately dart up the tree and save the cat while Mia looks on in approval. Wilson is basically a more obnoxious male version of You Can’t Scare Me‘s Courtney. No matter what, Jack cannot catch a break whenever he’s around. Things take a turn at Mia’s birthday party. First, Jack splits his pants during a game of Twister, but he sticks around to see Mia open her presents because he just knows she’s going to absolutely love the Purple Rose CD he got her. They’re her favorite band, after all. She gushes over the gift for all of two seconds before Wilson steps in and offers up two tickets to see Purple Rose LIVE in concert! Completely crushed, Jack jumps up and runs out of the party. Despite his incredibly rude behavior, all the partygoers try to chase him down – forcing him to hide in an old abandoned house where he discovers a dusty old book called Flying Lessons.
Flying Lessons turns out to be an instructional manual for human flight. Apparently, any person can soar through the air if they follow a few simple steps. Jack follows the book’s directions and whips up a weird blue potion that his dog, Morty, promptly eats because that’s what dogs do in R.L. Stine books. Morty instantly begins to float around the kitchen and, eventually, the neighborhood – forcing Jack to take the potion and rescue his beloved pet. Despite the near disaster, Flying Lessons lives up to its name, and now our hero is a cool flying kid who is totally going to put that dastardly Wilson in his place.
Of course, the minute he tries to show off his newfound abilities, he discovers that Wilson has also learned to fly by sneaking the book away when he wasn’t looking. So now both the kids can fly, and Jack’s dreams of finally outdoing his obnoxious neighbor are shattered. The two flying boys become famous, but only Wilson enjoys all of the attention. Jack would much rather be a normal kid, but that’s just not in the cards anymore. His dad arranges a race with Wilson, and thousands show up for the big event. Wilson takes to the sky, but Jack can’t leave the ground no matter how hard he tries. Somehow, he’s lost the power of flight! Wilson goes on to become a huge celebrity. He leaves school to make appearances all over the world and even gets his own TV show. Jack doesn’t mind at all because he’s so happy to have his old life back…..and because he didn’t tell anyone that he can still fly!!
It’s not really a “scary story” in the traditional sense, but it’s hard to be mad at How I Learned to Fly. It may not be a scary story, but it’ll absolutely keep you up all hours of the night dreaming of all the terrible things you’d like to do to teach Wilson – that ridiculous, overbearing showoff – a lesson he’ll never forget. I hate you, Wilson, and, one of these days, I’ll get you.
Thank you, Jack!” She set my present down on a table beside her. She reached for the next one. An envelope—just an envelope. No gift. “That’s mine,” Wilson leaned over and whispered to me. I can’t believe Wilson only brought Mia a card, I thought as I watched her tear open the flap. Only a card for her birthday. What kind of present is that? Mia stared into the envelope for a moment. Then she screamed. “Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!” She held up Wilson’s present. Two tickets. Two tickets to the Purple Rose concert at the Hollywood Bowl next month. Front row seats. “Oh, wow!” she shrieked again. “This is totally awesome!” Wilson shot me his big Wilson grin.
I love Christmas. It’s sort of impossible for me not to. I was born a week before the undisputed Holiday Champion of the World and grew up as a spoiled only child that the world revolved around. December is my month. The toy collection grows, the alcohol consumption goes unchecked and unjudged, and Smashing Pumpkins are added to the household playlist with nary a gripe or snicker because my favorite band of all time recorded a Christmas song, and that means that we’re going to hear Billy Corgan sing about watching kids open presents and enjoy every sacred second of it. You could say it’s my favorite time of the year, but you can’t because October 31st exists, and I spend 364 days a year waiting for its arrival. Even when I’m going through my latest Santa haul, I’m thinking about how I can still pull off a solid Joker costume while also hiding my shamefully bald head from onlookers.
It’s always been that way. I like candy; I like costumes, and I love scary stuff with the sort of burning passion that drove Rocky Balboa to KO Ivan Drago in Russia. As a kid, my parents played Drago to my Apollo year after year by ruthlessly snatching trick-or-treating away from me at the last minute thanks to my traditional “Needs Improvement” grades in conduct on fall report cards. Without the comfort of a stack of freshly rented horror tapes, I’m not 100% sure that I would’ve been able to cope with the trauma of sitting in my bedroom, in full costume, with an empty candy bucket in the corner. I can count how many times I’ve been trick-or-treating on one hand, but I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve been pulled back from the brink of madness by my morbid musts of the season.
Beetlejuice
What better movie to celebrate the night spirits are permitted to freely roam the land than a movie that shows us just how dull and tedious the afterlife really is and why the dearly departed can’t wait to take a day off? Beetlejuice is legendary. Michael Keaton is amazing. Winona Ryder is a badass. The living sculptures are pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel, and Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” is as important as “The Monster Mash” and “Somebody’s Watching Me” on any self-respecting October playlist. This all helps make Beetlejuice a Halloween Must Watch, but finding out that, once you die, you’re presented with a complicated manual that reads like stereo instructions and forced to take a number and wait for an appointment with your assigned caseworker is a lot like winning the Nickelodeon Super Toy Run; you’ll cherish the memory and relive it in your dreams forever and ever.
The long and short of it is that Beetlejuice is one of the most essential Halloween Essentials of the season. The movie’s version of a DMV-esque eternity is such a brilliant twist that the inclusion of Keaton in a black and white striped suit comes off as a bonus – a lot like the pickle spears Firehouse includes with their sandwiches. Sure, you’ve already got a meal that tastes like it was touched by the hands of God, but it never hurts to add a little extra oomph to an already divine experience. It’s showtime.
Halloween Havoc 95
“Astoundingly huge man runs over orange man’s motorcycle with a monster truck” may not sound like the set-up for the most Halloweentastic wrestling event in human history, but this foul deed led to the horrifying, the ghoulish, the UNSPEAKABLE battle for ultimate supremacy: Man vs Man and Machine vs Machine!!
WCW’s Halloween Havoc ‘95 is a perfect snapshot of what the company was like before the New World Order changed the pro-wrestling landscape forever. Fans who complained about the WWE going “PG” have zero idea what actual cartoony wrestling is and wouldn’t be able to handle Earth-shattering developments like the 400+ pound Avalanche realizing that he was part-fish all alone and decreeing that no Hulkamaniacs’ toes would ever be safe in the water again. WCW’s Dungeon of Doom consisted of a bunch of guys who looked like they traveled forward in time to raid the discount bin at a Spirit Halloween Store, and Havoc ‘95 was their show. We saw The Giant plunge from the top of the Joe Louis arena into the Detroit River after being defeated in one of the most gripping Monster Truck battles ever – only to reappear, like Frankenstein’s monster, for his main event showdown with The Hulkster (who just so happened be wearing black as a part of his “Dark Side Hogan” phase because Hulk likes Halloween, too). All that, alone, makes WCW’s signature October event the spookiest wrasslin’ show in town, but Eric Bischoff’s 90s ambition knew no bounds. October 31st is just another day on the calendar without a 7-foot-tall mummy emerging from an iceberg to destroy The Mega Powers and end Hulkamania forever, and, dammit, WCW wasn’t about to under deliver on one of their signature pay-per-view events. Thanks to the emergence of The Yeti, Halloween Havoc 1995 will go down in history as the wrestling equivalent of Jason Goes to Hell.
Halloween is the perfect horror movie, and Halloween 2 is the perfect horror movie sequel. I will die on that hill (only for my body to mysteriously disappear when Dr. Loomis looks away). An October 31st that passes by without watching these movies back to back is more tragic than the growing realization that there’s never going to be a Beetlejuice 2. Together, these movies are the definitive “Night HE Came Home” spectacular. Anything after Halloween 2 is a lot like the movies after Terminator 2 – really cool “what if” sequels that you can take or leave if you want. Of course, if you opt to “leave” a Halloween film featuring Donald Pleasence, then you’ve probably got no business watching a Halloween movie at all.
The television version of the original film added new scenes that better connected it to its follow-up and gave credence to the sequel’s reveal that Laurie Strode is the long lost sister of Michael Myers – which, as verified by the latest series entry, is clearly the superior approach to Tommy Doyle’s pumpkin-toting babysitter. The additional footage offers the chance to combine the two movies and create The Godfather Saga of slashers and firmly establish the fact that there wouldn’t be a chaotic Halloween Multiverse full of conflicting timelines and Busta Rhymes if they’d just left well enough alone and allowed the smooth sounds of The Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman” mark the definitive end of the world’s most committed trick-or-treater.
….then again, it’s frightening to think of the barren wasteland we would most assuredly inhabit today without Halloween 5 and the cookie woman scene.
Of course, it took more than The Yeti, Dr. Loomis, and The Ghost with the Most to get me through year after year of October cruelty, and I loooooove sequels, so tune in next week for more sanity-preserving monstrous madness!
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #51 – Beware, The Snowman
I think R.L. Stine was trying to write a Goosebumps story set in a cold, wintry environment as far back as The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena, but he never managed to get an entire book out of it. At least not until Beware, the Snowman. The book unfolds in a tiny village just outside of the arctic circle called Sherpia. Things kick off with Jaclyn DeForest and her Aunt Greta abruptly moving from Chicago to Sherpia with zero explanation beyond Aunt Greta’s insistence that “it’s time to move on.” Jaclyn is unique for a Goosebumps main character. She’s been raised by her aunt because her mom is dead, and her father mysteriously vanished before she was born. She’s an only child and doesn’t have a guy best friend who everyone thinks is her brother because they look so much alike. Beware, the Snowman is all Jaclyn’s story. It’s just sort of a shame that her story is kind of silly.
As soon as she arrives, Jaclyn notices that everyone in town keeps a big scar faced snowman with a red scarf in their front yard. When she asks Rolonda and Eli – the obligatory brother/sister duo next door – what the deal is, they give cryptic responses and change the subject. When she decides to go for a walk towards the big mountain that looms over town, the siblings freak out and tell her what a terrible idea that is. She ignores their warnings and presses on up the mountain path where she comes upon a cabin inhabited by an angry old hermit named Conrad and his pet wolf. Jaclyn hightails it back into the village, and Rolonda eventually relents and tells her the local legend.
Years ago, two sorcerers used their magic to bring a snowman to life, but their chilly buddy was evil and rampaged through the village until the sorcerers managed to seal him in an ice cave atop the mountain. Then, they disappeared, and Conrad showed up shortly afterwards. No one knows if he works for the snowman or if he’s somehow protecting the town because he doesn’t talk to anyone. One thing everyone knows for sure is that the big, mean, nasty snowman is still at the top of the mountain because they can still hear him up there roaring and howling. So everyone puts a big snowman in their front yard so that, if the big guy does come down for another rampage, he’ll be happy to see how revered he is and decide to sign a few autographs and take some pictures with fans instead of destroying stuff.
Aunt Greta is super evasive when Jaclyn brings up the malevolent Frosty, so she decides to head up the mountain and get some answers for herself. She gets around Conrad with some help from Rolonda and Eli, and then she meets a big, angry snowman who demands to know her name. After she introduces herself, the snowman lays down some shocking news: he’s her father! Nooooo! That’s impossible! The off-brand Yeti reveals that Aunt Greta is really a sorcerer who cast a terrible, ten-year-long snowman spell on him, and she’s only back in Sherpia to extend the curse for another decade. Jaclyn is his only hope! After this stunning revelation, Aunt Greta shows up, calls Frosty a liar, and explains that Jaclyn’s parents were the sorcerers who brought the creature to life all those years ago. She insists the snowman is a dirty liar, but Jaclyn frees him anyway after she remembers an old poem her mother used to say that’s actually a magic spell for freeing snowmen. Unfortunately, Aunt Greta was telling the truth, and the snowman is really just a nasty, red monster ready to wreak havoc!
Just when the whole village and possibly the world seems doomed forever, Conrad shows up with an army of the snowmen from the village en-tow. He’s Jaclyn’s real father; he’s a sorcerer, and he’s ready to make things right. The snowman army converges on the monster and leaves him frozen in a big block of ice. Then, the snowmen complain about how chilly it is up on the mountain, and everyone laughs as the credits roll on another zany adventure with R.L. Stine.
“Jaclyn—I am your father,” the snowman repeated, lowering his booming voice. He stared down at me with those frightening, round glassy eyes. “Believe me.”
“Th-that’s impossible!” I stammered. I hugged myself, trying to stop my body from trembling. “You’re a snowman! You can’t be my father!”
Oh how I love 90s DTV horror. The Granny – a 1995 flick that actually went direct-to-drive-in before it hit video store shelves – somehow manages to capture everything that makes the best of these sorts of movies so amazingly amazing. It’s about a demonic grandmother wreaking deadly vengeance on her greedy family who can’t wait for her to die, so they can inherit her $175-million-dollar estate. I understand if that brief synopsis is enough to make you want to close this article and jump right into the movie, but fair warning: this one was kinda tough to track down, and you may need to use a little Internet magic to experience the glory of The Granny. It took me awhile to find anything other than a trimmed down version on YouTube, but, much like my years-long quest to own a Terror Drome, the payoff was worth the effort.
Technically speaking, The Granny is a Thanksgiving movie since it revolves around the whole brood gathering for Turkey Day in the big family mansion. Granny insists that they’re all a bunch of hedonistic heathens except for Kelly– her oldest son’s “bastard daughter” who selflessly lives with and takes care of her beloved grandmother. Kelly’s defining characteristic is that she’s so plain that no man would have her, but Granny loves her anyway and fully intends to leave the whole estate to her dutiful granddaughter. After all, what hope for a happy life does a lonely, beastly girl like Kelly have?
Before the family arrives, a mysterious guy brings Granny a mysterious elixir containing the mysterious secret of immortality. She ordered it from an ad in the back of a magazine. Immortality awaits in the places we least expect it, I guess. Anyway, the guy explains that he’s peddling the immortality potion specifically to people with enough “goodness” to make the world super awesome and pleasant, and Granny’s charitable donations officially qualify her for the deal. All she has to do is keep away from direct sunlight, make peace with her family, and perform a cleansing ritual before she turns up the magical bottle. Of course, the minute the bottle is left unattended, Kelly pulls back a curtain and exposes it to the sun – corrupting the formula and dooming Granny’s poor cat, Wolfgang, to a life as a monster-cat after it laps up some of the cursed concoction.
Granny tries to make peace with her family, but that’s easier said than done. Her grandson is determined to wrestle her in a boneheaded attempt to prove that the Sting vs Steve Austin match she’s trying to watch on TV is “fake,” and both of her sons try to poison her at the dinner table. She loudly and angrily tells her family what horrible heathens they all are (except for poor, ugly Kelly) and decrees that they’ll never see a penny of her fortune right before she collapses from exhaustion. She’s taken upstairs – where she drinks the now-evil elixir, and seemingly falls over dead. The fiendish family is thrilled with this development because they’ve forged Granny’s signature on a new will that leaves everything to everyone but Kelly. She hilariously gets a whole dollar for devoting her adult life to taking care of her grandmother.
This family is made up of the most unapologetically evil bunch of “vultures and crows; monkeys and magpies” ever assembled. Kelly is regularly insulted – right to her face – by everyone but her youngest half-sister, Amy. The tragically disfigured girl’s stepmom is completely obsessed with Granny’s fur collection, and her older half-sister is determined to hook up with her uncle so they can combine their share of the inheritance and live a lavishly lush lifestyle. Not only are these people predatory, they’re completely nonchalant about incest. But, in typical horror movie fashion, all of their selfish desires lead to their delightfully silly undoings. Stepmom’s fur comes to life and eats her. Uncle Incest winds up losing a fairly essential appendage when his attempt to bed his niece goes terribly awry; the kid who whined about a Steve Austin match gets an ironic taste of stone cold justice when Granny goes Owen Hart on his neck, and Kelly’s dad – a successful plastic surgeon who refers to his wife as “his creation” – winds up as a talking, disembodied head in a casserole dish at a macabre undead dinner party.
The movie’s crudeness is so over-the-top that you’ll wonder if it was written by a trio of twelve-year-olds who only recently worked up the courage to start saying the F-word out loud. The wrestling stepbrother says his parents are “probably bumping uglies” when he’s asked where they are, and Granny refers to one of her sons as “the load I should have swallowed” before she becomes a demon of doom. She’s just as mean and nasty as the rest of the clan – leaving one to wonder how she ever qualified as someone capable of spreading goodness and love around the world. It’s a good example of why you can’t expect good customer service from any of those back-of-the-magazine ads. Everyone, every single person in the house sans Kelly and Amy, has a Bachelor’s in Rudeness with a Minor in Sleaze. This means that you’re able to enjoy the increasingly over-the-top murders without a smidge of regret or a hint of “aw I wish this one would’ve made it.” The most tragic loss in the whole thing is the cat. Wolfgang didn’t deserve that.
Everything boils down to a clash between Kelly, her gruesome gran, and her zombified fam that allows her to take out years of frustration on the folks who made her life so miserable while also having her dress ripped in inexplicably convenient areas. It’s a shame she’s so unattractive. Anyway, Kelly manages to use the power of the sun to take care of Granny once and for all. The cops show up and buy the old “my elderly, wheelchair bound grandmother wasn’t actually dead and came back home and slaughtered everyone but me” story without asking a single question. They probably just don’t want to look at the girl any longer than they have to. Everything seems right with the world until, for absolutely no reason on Earth, we find out that Granny’s evil has somehow possessed both Kelly and Amy right before the credits roll.
The Granny is, without a doubt, one of the most fun pieces of mid-90s horror schlock I’ve seen. The movie knows exactly what it is and makes zero attempt to act all pretentious and pretend that it’s something other than a 90-minute brain scrubber featuring a late night TV veteran playing an ugly girl who isn’t ugly without her glasses and a nonstop onslaught of salacious slasher silliness.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #50 – Calling All Creeps!
Goosebumps rings in its big five-oh with Calling All Creeps! – a twisted tale of revenge gone wrong. I enjoyed everything about this book. It’s wacky; it’s got purple monsters, and it’s slightly problematic in a modern context.
The story kicks off with Ricky “The Rat” Beamer sneaking into his school to play a dastardly prank on Tasha McClain. She unfairly fired our heroic narrator for reasons that were entirely beyond his control. Ricky the Rat aka Sicky Ricky was targeted by a foursome of bullies – Wart, Jared, Brenda, and David – who caused a series of unfortunate Pepsi spilling and camera breaking incidents that resulted in his completely unjustified dismissal from The Harding Herald, so he’s decided to take it out on Tasha because the bullies are too intimidating to deal with.
Ricky is your classic Goosebumps downtrodden kid. The entire school hates him, and, no matter what he does, nothing ever goes right. Any and all attempts at redemption blow up in his face. Tasha subjects him to some pretty harsh verbal abuse before she kicks him off the paper and dooms him to summer school because these kids go to a bizarre middle school that doesn’t allow kids to move onto the next grade without extracurricular “activity points.” So he decides to put a blurb in the Herald with Tasha’s phone number and a message encouraging “all creeps” to give her a call.
This predictably blows up in his face when Tasha catches the prank at the last second and swaps the phone number to Ricky’s. Afterwards, he gets a series of nightly calls from mysterious people claiming to be Creeps and repeatedly asking when they’re going to meet. He thinks it’s just another case of kids at school trying to make his life miserable, but then he gets pulled into the woods by Wart and pals – who reveal themselves as purple lizard creatures; they’re Creeps!!
The monsters think Ricky is their commander-in-chief – which is great news for the crew because they’ve been waiting for the perfect plan to trick the school into eating a crop of “identity seeds” that will transform the entire student body into Creeps and get the whole “overtake Earth” ball rolling. Ricky leads them on a mission to put the seeds in the cafeteria’s crusty macaroni that no one eats because they don’t think macaroni should be crusty and haven’t bothered to consider that the crust could be glorious melted cheese. When the plan doesn’t pan out, Wart and the others get suspicious of their leader until Iris – Ricky’s obligatory girl best friend – shows up and vouches for him. From there, the Creeps target the school’s bake sale with a fiendish plot to lace chocolate chip cookies with the seeds of doom. He and Iris try to tell the kids not to eat the cookies, but no one listens because they all hate Sicky Ricky and aren’t about to pass up free cookies. When he realizes that he’s going to be the Chief Creep, Ricky decides to let the kids turn into monsters. Then, he eats one of the cookies and thinks about how great things are about to be.
In some ways, Calling All Creeps! is a little sloppy. Iris doesn’t serve any real purpose to the plot and disappears entirely during the grand finale, and Ricky has a tendency to be so whiny that you can’t help but wish the Creeps would just eat him. In spite of that, it’s a fun story. The whole “bullied kid taking revenge on the entire school” idea didn’t age all that well, but you can’t blame R.L. Stine for that, so don’t do it.
She uttered an angry groan. “Young man, our macaroni is delicious,” she declared. “I’m so sick and tired of jokes about our food.”
“She’s right!” Another cook, Mrs. Davis, chimed in from across the room. She waved a long mixing spoon at me. “We make good, wholesome food here. It’s like home-cooked. And we’re tired of all the horrible jokes.”
“We have feelings, you know,” Mrs. Marshall added.
“We use real cheese in the macaroni,” Mrs. Davis called, still waving her spoon. “None of that artificial stuff. And real macaroni noodles.”
“Halloween II ½” is the second of the three Real Ghostbusters Halloween Specials. I have no idea what the ½ is about – unless it means that it’s only half as entertaining as the original. If that’s the case, then ½ has all the business in the world being in the title because this ain’t no “When Halloween Was Forever.”
The Ghostbusters’ second October outing came later in the series, so you’ve got to cope with Venkman’s new voice actor, Janine looking like a completely different person, Ray suddenly becoming skinny, Slimer taking center stage and developing a vocabulary, and the insufferable, intolerable, inexcusable Junior Ghostbusters. While there’s definitely a gem here and there, the later Real Ghostbusters episodes pale in comparison to the ones that kicked things off and ushered in a paradise of Kenner toys, tie-in cereal, and the best damned Hi C flavor ever conceived.
Despite the show’s steadily declining quality, “Halloween II ½” managed to be kinda/sorta/actually pretty good. Samhain is back on the scene, and that immediately makes “Halloween II ½” exactly 10 ½ times better because it features a guy who just wants it to be October 31st every day. But not even a purple-clad pumpkinheaded phantom can change the fact that the episode is a mixed bag of sugary delights and cold copper pennies of cruelty. So let’s break down the pro(ton)s and cons of The Real Ghostbusters second spooky spectacular!
GREAT:It’s a Halloweentastic Halloween Special
‘When Halloween Was Forever” has a lot going for it; after all, it introduced Samhain and included a song about Frankenstein’s love of grooving. Since it’s from the first season, it’s better written and animated and doesn’t have stupid Uncle Joey doing an awful Bill Murray impression. Despite all that, “Halloween II ½” feels more like a Halloween Special than its predecessor. Sure, the episode kicks off with the Junior Ghostbusters, but at least they’re out trick-or-treating. Somehow that never fails to quell my disgust enough to keep watching instead of turning the television off and spending the next few hours thinking mean thoughts about a group of Ghostbuster-loving kids. The fact that Slimer is dressed up as a ghost despite being a ghost himself is pretty funny, and the big Firehouse Halloween Party is the best thing in the entire world. Everything about the episode screams “Happy Halloween!” – right down to Peter, Ray, Egon, and Winston’s druid robes.
BAD: The Junior Ghostbusters Exist
I didn’t like the Junior Ghostbusters when I was official Junior Ghostbuster age, and my hatred has only increased tenfold now that I’m old enough to realize how annoying and totally in-the-way these kids are. Their presence comes from the same mindset that created Batman’s Boy Wonder sidekick: “Let’s have a kid character for the viewers to project themselves onto!” That never works. Robin is the exception. Why would I want to imagine myself as a Junior Ghostbuster when I could imagine myself as a Real Ghostbuster? That’s like telling kids to give up on all those awesome dreams of saving the world and settle for riding around in a go-cart with a slingshot like these three losers that I was never remotely jealous of even though they got to hang out with and be officially endorsed by the world’s first and foremost professional paranormal investigators and eliminators.
AWESOME: “Turning off these machines would be extremely hazardous!”
The Real Ghostbusters didn’t make that many references to the movies, but, when it did, you ate it up and asked for seconds. After Samhain’s goblin minions break him out of the Containment Unit, we get a firehouse roof explosion straight out of the first movie before The Real Pumpkin King emerges to take his unholy vengeance on the four interfering mortals who dared to imprison him and crush his seasonal plans. This part is doubly amazing for me because I get to see the roof go, and I get to see the monstrous, jack-o’-lantern headed Spirt of Halloween emerge from the wreckage. It’s like that time I ordered a Part 1 Freddy figure, received the Part 2 Freddy by mistake, and got to keep him while also getting Part 1 Freddy. Sometimes the stars line up just right and truly amazing things can happen.
DEVASTATING:Dave Coulier as Peter
Lorenzo Music, the guy who portrayed Garfield to great acclaim and co-created the utterly fantastic Bob Newhart Show, voiced Dr. Peter Venkman for The Real Ghostbusters’ first two seasons. He was awesome and absolutely perfect for the ‘toon version of Peter, but, according to legend, Bill Murray wasn’t a fan of his character sounding like the legendary lasagna loving cat. As a result, Music was replaced by freakin’ Uncle Joey, and, all of a sudden, the team’s resident funnyman was infuriatingly unbearable. Dave Coulier’s take on the character is like Creed to Lorenzo Music’s Beatles. Every time I think I’m finally used to it, I watch an episode like “Halloween II ½” hot on the heels of “When Halloween was Forever” and am forced to retreat to the bedroom and spend eight-hours watching the Garfield and Friends channel on Pluto. Is it cool to see Dr. Venkman in druid duds? It’s not just cool. It’s awesome. Unfortunately, Coulier’s grating presence comes dangerously close to pulling off the unfathomable by making it not awesome. Utterly unacceptable.
PRETTY NEAT:From Firehouse to Hell House
There’s zero doubt in my mind that the coolest and best part of the episode is when Samhain takes over the iconic Ghostbusters HQ and transforms it into his Evil Tower of Halloween Terror that only ghosts can enter. How can the Boys in Grey (and brown, and blue, and teal) ever hope to conquer their otherworldly opponent when they can’t even retake their own firehouse? If you guessed “they’ll use Slimer to infiltrate the place,” then bravo. That’s exactly what happens. Slimer goes in and finds a big pillar where the containment unit used to be. Egon explains that this is the structure’s “keystone.”- which means that, when the guys blast it with their proton beams, the whole thing comes crashing down. Then the Firehouse inexplicably reappears in the rubble as if nothing ever happened. That’s just what happens when you’ve done such an effective job of saving the day.
“Halloween II ½” suffers from the same problems that ultimately dragged the series down, but it manages to work around those issues and still be entertaining thanks to its fantastic seasonal atmosphere and a big, heaping dose of Pumpkin Power.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #49 – Vampire Breath
My biggest takeaway from Vampire Breath was that it wasn’t all that great despite being the first straight-up vampire story in the original series. It’s a little surprising that it took 48 books for R.L. Stine to finally tackle the bloodsucking undead, and it’s a tragically disappointing that his attempt to do so wound up being underwhelming. Vampire Breath manages to include hidden crypts, vampires, and even time travel – all while not doing anything interesting with any of these ideas.
Freddy and his best friend Cara are “two tough kids,” and they regularly engage in vicious wrestling matches to hone their toughness. These bizarrely brutal fights set the events of the story into motion when Cara tosses Freddy into a china cabinet at his house and knocks everything off. The two badasses discover that the cabinet was blocking a hidden, mysterious, super-secret door that leads them down a long and winding passageway where they discover a crypt with a coffin containing a small glass bottle labeled “Vampire Breath.” The bottle is immediately opened and the room gets enveloped in a foul-smelling green mist. When it dissipates, a body has appeared in the coffin – Count “Don’t You Dare Call Me Dick Grayson” Nightwing!
The vampire declares that he’s thirsty, but he’s unable to feed on the two kids because he’s missing his fangs and doesn’t remember where he put them. Before you get a chance to ponder the implications of vampires with detachable fangs, Nightwing drops another bombshell when he reveals that the bottle of Vampire Breath allows him to travel back in time, so he can retrieve his fangs and go back to being a well-fed vampire. The Count accidentally brings Freddy and Cara along for his time travel expedition, and the two tough tweens find themselves in a creeeeepy castle full of caskets and vampires and a whole lot of no-good things. Nightwing still can’t find his fangs because he hasn’t had enough Vampire Breath to fully regain his memory. It turns out that all vampires have terrible memories and need Vampire Breath to keep them sharp.
A “find the Vampire Breath before Nightwing finds it first!” chase through the castle occurs. Eventually, another bottle winds up being emptied, more green fog fills the room, and the trio travel back to the present day to the crypt where The Count was first discovered. Then Jerry’s parents walk in, and his mother calls Nightwing “Daddy.” It turns out that he’s Jerry’s grandfather, and the whole family are vampires! Jerry’s fangs just haven’t grown in yet because R.L. Stine thinks that kids won’t remember a strikingly similar twist with the exact same “your fangs haven’t grown in yet!” explanation in The Girl Who Cried Monster. Well, I remembered, Stine. I remembered. Anyway, the story ends with the adults turning into bats and flying away. Cara and Freddy discover yet another strange bottle – this one labeled “Werewolf Sweat.” It gets opened; Cara growls, and that’s a wrap.
It’s not the worst story in the world or even the worst book in the series. It’s just completely boring – despite spanning across the centuries, introducing a whole new piece of vampire lore, and shamelessly stealing the name of a longstanding DC Comics character. Vampire Breath would have been better as a short story in the one of the Tales to Give You Goosebumps books. Trying to stretch it beyond fifteen pages was a bad call.
Making me see stars is Cara’s hobby. She does it all the time. She can do it with one punch.
Cara is tough.
That’s why she’s my best friend. We’re both tough. When the going gets tough, we never crumble!
Ask anyone. Freddy Martinez and Cara Simonetti. Two tough kids.
Are You Afraid of the Dark was the bee’s knees of early 90s kids’ TV. The world didn’t know how much it needed a pint-sized version of Tales from the Crypt with a dash of Tales from the Dark Side and just a pinch of Twilight Zone sprinkled in to elevate its flavor and taste. Then, The Midnight Society arrived on the scene and showed us all just how desolate and lacking our lives were before they gathered around a campfire for the first time. The series provided five whole seasons of stories focusing on spirits of cigar-loving clowns, swimming pool monsters, and a boy helplessly transforming into a leprechaun.
There’s never a bad time to watch it, but Are You Afraid of the Dark is close, personal friends with Halloween, and I struggle to recall a single October that didn’t consist of being fed a healthy serving of chilling chicanery – all with an obligatory “The Tale of the” prefix. With that in mind, I submit for your approval a whopping five episode essentials to compliment the witches and black cats and ghosts and goblins and candy corn we all spend the whole year waiting for. Did I mention the super-convenient coincidence of covering five episodes with a mere four weeks until the big day? Start watching now before time runs out forever!
The Tale of the Twisted Claw
This one was the series’ Halloween Special and the first episode to air. The story is just a version of “The Monkey’s Paw” that centers on twelve-year-olds and tosses in a witch and a horrifying gang of candy-stealing teenagers for extra spookiness. This one always seemed a little meaner and more foreboding than most of the other episodes. Maybe it was the aforementioned teenage gang; maybe it was the demonic attack dog that shows up to ensure the main character wins a track meet, or maybe it was the fact that I was seven-years-old and the only Nickelodeon Halloween Special I’d seen up until that point was Marc Summers’ Mystery Magical Tour. One of the biggest takeaways I got from “Twisted Claw” – other than the whole being careful what you wish for thing – was that the night before Halloween is called Mischief Night, and Mischief Night is all tricks and no treats. I also still get a chuckle out of the “I don’t care if it jumps up and picks my nose!” line. The dog, on the other hand, looks a whole lot less demonic these days.
The Tale of the Prom Queen
Once upon a time, Nickelodeon’s target audience extended beyond elementary and middle schoolers and included teens as well. “Prom Queen” is a solid example of that – with a cast noticeably older than your typical Are You Afraid of the Dark kids and a Resurrection Mary-inspired story that revolves around prom night, drunk driving, and the suicide of a distraught boyfriend who failed to pick up his prom date before she was run down by a car. The girl’s spirit returns every year on Prom Night to wait for a ride that never shows up. In the episode, two would-be ghost hunters hoping for an encounter with the Ghostly Girl meet up with a Mysterious Girl who totally isn’t the ghost they’re looking for even though she meets them in the cemetery and uses dated language and is super impressed with technological advances like microfiche. The trio summon the dead boyfriend’s spirit from the bottom of the lake he drove his car into, and then he shows up to finally pick up his date who, by the way, was actually the mysterious girl the wannabe paranormal investigators and eliminators were looking for the whole time!! Drunken hit and runs and teen suicide weren’t your typical Nickelodeon fare, but they made for a great, if not insanely predictable, Midnight Society submission.
The Tale of the Full Moon
Werewolves and Halloween go together like salami and provolone, so “The Tale of the Full Moon” is an essential ingredient for maximizing October cheer. It’s the most childish and Goosebumps-esque episode in this list, and I know that it’s a surprising inclusion because I’m obviously way too old to enjoy something as silly as an R.L. Stine book. Despite its lighter tone, “Full Moon” is a fun episode that centers on a kid pet detective and his desperate quest to overcome his newly-single mom’s “no dogs allowed” decree. He stumbles on the fact that his new neighbor has a collection of collars belonging to the neighborhood’s missing pets and a fridge full of raw meat. This leads him to draw the understandable conclusion that he’s living next door to a werewolf. He’s not too happy about that, but he’s especially disturbed when his mother starts dating the suspected wolf from across the street because a stepfather with lycanthropy is a lot to ask a twelve-year-old to cope with. Luckily enough, the whole thing turns out to be a hilarious misunderstanding, and the real werewolf is revealed as the neighbor’s twin brother who lives in the basement and winds up becoming the family dog our hero was hoping for. And he quits eating pets, too.
The Tale of the Midnight Ride
You don’t need the story of Ichabod Crane and The Headless Horsemen for your Halloween to be complete, but it definitely adds to the experience. Maybe it’s just my affinity for jack-o’-lantern headed baddies, but I’ve always had a thing for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. So, of course I’m game for a high school version of the tale that’s far truer to the source material than anything other than Disney’s animated short. It includes modern day versions of Ichabod, Katrina, and Brom Bones in the forms of Ian, Katie, and Brad, and kinda/sorta recreates the original story’s love triangle. While that’s pretty neat, The Headless Horsemen chasing two kids on bicycles through the woods is what elevates this episode’s concept from “neat” to “totally amazing.”
The Tale of the Night Shift
You can’t have Halloween without a vampire story or else The Great Pumpkin will break into your home, raid your fridge, and rearrange your living room at the stroke of midnight on October 31st. “The Night Shift” was the final episode of the original series, but it feels more like something out of the first season. The story takes place on the children’s ward at a hospital that hires high school kids as janitors and gives volunteers an astounding level of access to its patients and medical supplies. Working the night shift is pretty tough on a high school student, but it’s especially trying when the mail-order water pump turns out to be an ancient vampire eager to feed on a hospital chock full of victims. It’s actually a surprisingly good blood sucking caper with some genuinely creepy elements to it – like all the hospital employees succumbing to the vampire’s power and the big reveal that a kindly kid-loving candy striper is actually an evil, undead creature from the fiery pits of Hell.
Are You Afraid of the Dark was revived a few times after the first series ended, but, thanks to Nickelodeon making significant adjustments to its content, none of them came close to living up to the awesomeness of the original. They even rebooted it once as an episodic saga instead of an anthology – an idea more frightening than that oversized hand Dr. Vink (with a Va-Va-Va) keeps in his cottage.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #49 – Attack of the Jack-O’-Lanterns
Going forward, I’m reading these books for the first time. I’ll sort of miss comparing how I felt to how I feel about the stories, but at least I don’t have to hang my head in shame when I realize that several of the books I initially hated weren’t so bad after all. Being a kid literary snob is pretty terrible, but it’s absolutely devastating to realize that I dropped the series right before its newest Halloween special – Attack of the Jack-o’-Lanterns – was about to hit shelves. I missed out on a story about pumpkinheaded monsters forcing twelve-year-olds to trick or treat forever all because I was mad about Legend of the Lost Legend.
Attack of the Jack-o’-Lanterns is a unique entry in the series. It packs a whopping six characters all conveniently paired up in boy/girl duos. There’s Drew – our main character and narrator – and her best friend Walker. They’re good pals with Shane and Shana – the chubby twins referred to as “roly-poly” by Drew’s fat shaming father. The foursome has spent the past two Halloweens trying to put the fear of Samhain into their hated rivals, Tabby and Lee. Tabby is described as “little miss perfect,” and Lee is “African-American and sort of struts when he walks and acts real cool, like the rappers on MTV videos.”
Tabby and Lee scared all the kids in the neighborhood three years earlier by getting two teenagers to help them stage a home invasion and hostage situation during their Halloween party. These kids don’t mess around when it comes to pranks, but Drew and her friends are determined to pay them back – even after two straight years of trying and failing. This time, they’ve got a terrifyingly terrible, hideously horrific scheme to finally traumatize their enemies, and it’s all going down on Halloween!
The six kids agree to meet up and spend the evening hitting up houses together. Drew has a little trouble convincing her parents to let her go out because of a series of local disappearances, but, since the missing are all fat, three-chinned adults, they ultimately relent, and Drew heads out eager to taste the sweet nectar of vengeance. The plan seemingly goes awry right from the get-go when Shane and Shana don’t show up, and the four kids are promptly joined by a monstrous pair of trick-or-treaters with fire breathing jack-o’-lanterns for heads. Lee and Tabby are too smart for such transparent nonsense, though. They immediately conclude the two pumpkinheads are the missing twins and laugh at their poor attempt at one-upping the masters of Halloween scaring. However, they appreciate the effort and think the fire breathing effects are pretty neat.
The pumpkinheads lead the four kids through the woods to a mysterious new neighborhood where they insist on hitting a never-ending series of houses even after the kids start whining and wanting to go home. At this point, the pumpkin pair reveal the spine-chilling truth: they’re really evil, Halloween-loving monsters with jack-o’-lanterns for heads!! They make the kids hit up a few more houses – all occupied by Ghostbusters Halloween Special enthusiasts – until their bags can’t hold anymore. Then, they force the group to shovel all their sugary treats down their throats to free up valuable bag space for more trick-or-treating. While that doesn’t sound so bad, the big mob of jack-o’-monsters who show up for the whole “we’re going to give you all pumpkinheads!” thing doesn’t seem so great for Drew and her crew. Lee and Tabby get pumpkins slammed over their heads and run screaming off into the night, and everyone starts laughing. It turns out that the Shane and Shana were the jack-o’-monsters after all! They’re aliens, and they got the help of a bunch of their alien friends to help Drew and Walker pull off the bestest Halloween prank ever! Oh, and they eat fat people. But Drew and Walker don’t have to worry about that because they’re still skinny. This year.
So, really, this is basically a “too much candy will make you fat” story disguised as a Goosebumps tale. But I love Halloween and folks with jack-o’-lanterns for heads, so I can’t be mad at it.
The police are warning people to be very careful,” Mom said softly.
Walker walked over and took the newspaper from my hands. He studied the photos for a moment. “Hey—these people are all fat!” he exclaimed.
Now we all clustered around the paper and stared at the gray photos. Walker was right. All four people were very overweight. The first one, a bald man in a bulging turtleneck sweater, had at least six chins!
The Amityville Horror is one of those movies I knew by reputation long before I ever watched James Brolin’s beard grow thick with rage in the original. Thanks to the local Movie Gallery’s horror section, I knew the Amityville franchise contained an overwhelming amount of sequels, but, for whatever reason, I never bothered with them. The first one wasn’t one of my favorite movies. I’m a sucker for a good haunted house story, but Amityville Horror seemed pretty run-of-the-mill to me. That doesn’t change the fact that the movie spawned over twenty sequels, and I was bound to be conquered by curiosity sooner or later. I can only ignore a horror series spanning across that many sequels for so long. Unless it’s Puppet Master. Puppet Master just isn’t my thing.
After tackling the Children of the Corn saga and studying the gospel of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, I wasn’t about to be intimidated by an eye-level stack of movie-length Discovery Channel “I saw a ghost!” docuseries reenactments. Maybe I should have been. Truth be told, I’ve only made it up to the 2005 remake, but my wife’s determination to press on sends more chills up my spine than the fourth movie’s demonic lamp. I didn’t anticipate that, after Amityville 3D, the movies were done going back to the famous Ocean Avenue home and its demonic fly infestation. Instead, we get a “this lamp/clock/dollhouse came from the house and it’s eeeeeeevil” approach with results ranging from pretty decent to coma inducing. The worst ones aren’t even your typical bad horror fare with cringe-inducing effects and actors who look and sound like they’re reading cue cards. Terry O’Quinn shows up for Amityville: The New Generation, and not even that does much to liven up one of the most boring movies I’ve forced myself to sit through in years. Trying to trudge through Amityville Curse, though? I recommend coffee. Consuming enough alcohol to make that one entertaining will almost certainly result in blindness and potential death.
Amityville 1992: It’s About Time is a lot of things. Boring isn’t one of them. It’s one of the wildest DTV horror trainwrecks I have ever seen, and it is absolutely glorious.
Things kick off with Iris Wheeler – the movie’s obligatory “old lady with inexplicable insight into all the supernatural stuff that happens” – shamelessly standing on the sidewalk staring at the Sterling’s house like being nosey and overly invested in what your neighbors are doing is socially acceptable behavior. She watches as Jacob Sterling arrives home after a business trip. He’s happily reunited with his two teenage kids – Rusty and Lisa – and he’s ready to show off the sweet new antique clock he picked up while he was in New York. Despite being teenagers, Jacob decided that his kids needed a babysitter and that it was completely normal and appropriate to have his ex-live-in girlfriend Andrea do the job. This seems like an incredibly strange thing to do, but “incredibly strange” is what It’s About Time specializes in. Getting the ex to move in with your kids while you’re out on business is a totally conventional idea compared to something like Lisa being seduced and groped by her own reflection later on. The Sterling patriarch lovingly places his new clock on the mantel, and the haunted hijinks begin in earnest.
Andrea gets convinced to spend one more night at the house, and the viewer gets treated to the sweatiest horror movie sex scene ever committed to film when Jacob manages to talk her into bed. She’s ready to head back to grad school the next morning, but she’s forced to take Jacob to the ER after he’s mauled by a dog who is absolutely fed up with his bullshit. The ER doctor bizarrely releases him into Andrea’s care despite the fact that he’s got an oozing, gaping wound on his leg. Even though she’s got to get back to school and even though he’s her ex and she’s currently dating someone else, Andrea elects to stay at the house to change Jacob’s bandages and dress the wound until he’s all better. The man lives with two teenagers who should be perfectly capable of routine wound care, but Rusty and Lisa aren’t going to help emotionally manipulate a young woman back into his life, so Andrea gets guilted into taking care of former boyfriend. The live-in nurse arrangement makes even less sense when she’s ordered to leave Jacob alone after emptying an entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide on his bite wound. From there, Andrea goes from nurse to stepmom and spends the rest of the movie trying to take care of the two kids.
Rusty is immediately suspicious of the clock of evil, and, since he’s good pals with Iris, he gets clued in on all the important mythology stuff that ties everything back to the evil house at 112 Ocean Avenue. It turns out that the clock originated in the Child Killing Room in some sort of medieval torture chamber before it managed to find its way to Long Island. You’d almost think that the Amityville connection was shoehorned into a script about an ancient cursed clock terrorizing a family, but that’s a silly thought that you should stop thinking right this instant. Of course this was written to be an Amityville movie. Look at the title!
Jacob and his daughter quickly succumb to the terrifying timepiece. Jacob’s wound gets worse and worse, and he starts sneaking out to paint Nazi signs on his neighbors’ houses in between feverishly sketching and building models of the Amityville house. Lisa is sexually assaulted by her own reflection and transforms from naïve girl to a completely over the top seductress. Her sex-charged shenanigans include causing her boyfriend to dissolve into a big puddle of flesh covered goo before he’s sucked down the basement drain and trying to force herself on her brother – leaving poor Rusty with no option other than to electrocute his sibling to death.
Of course, things only get worse and worse for Andrea and Rusty. Andrea’s current boyfriend, a hilariously pompous psychiatrist, shows up and promptly moves in because things weren’t already inappropriate enough. Rusty catches the blame for his dad’s neighborhood hate crimes, so the cops are constantly bothering him – even when he’s trying to mourn Iris after she’s impaled by a big stork that falls off a diaper truck. It’s About Time never stops delivering. Just when you’re starting to wrap your mind around death by beak, you get to see the clock manipulate the flow of time to transform Rusty into a baby and Andrea into a frail old woman in the final confrontation.
Old Lady Andrea manages to blow the nefarious clock to bits in an inspiring and heroic act of self-sacrifice – only to wake up back at the beginning of the movie. This time around, she remembers the whole ordeal and what a narcissistic asshole Jacob is, so, when he shows up at the door with the evil clock in tow, Andrea snatches it away and smashes it into splinters before finally getting out of the house and back to a life without demonic clocks and cursed bite wounds.
Out of all its insanity, the most bizarre thing is that It’s About Time somehow manages to work. When Andrea slams the Sterling’s front door and walks away, you want to stand up and cheer – not because you’ve spent 90 minutes watching her be terrorized – because you’re so damn happy to see her willingly walk out of one unhealthiest relationships ever. It’s About Time!!!
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #47 – Legend of the Lost Legend
I hated Legend of the Lost Legend with a passion. I swore off the series way back in 1996 because of this book. It felt like the biggest waste of time, pages, and brain power ever. I didn’t expect to feel differently a few decades later, but I didn’t expect Tatanka to side with Ted DiBiase and join the Million Dollar Corporation, either. Somehow, some way this one clicked for me. I got it. Maybe I should have read it twice back in the day. I may not have donated all the books to the school library and saved myself a few hundred dollars a little money in the process when I grew up and decided I needed a second helping of Monster Blood.
The book opens up in the midst of a third-person adventure in Antarctica. Justin Clarke and his younger sister Marissa get stranded on a block of ice right in the middle of the Arctic Ocean before you even get a chance to meet their irresponsible parents or the neighborhood bullies. Right about the time you’re thinking “wow this is certainly unexpected” the narrative shifts to first-person, and the entire opening affair is revealed to be a story from Mr. Clarke – world class traveler, adventurer, and collector of folklore and legends. For some reason, Mr. Clarke gets a kick out of making up stories about his kids in peril.
Justin and Marissa are out with their dad exploring the remote forests of the remote country of Brovania. Mr. Clarke is in search of a treasure chest that contains the mysterious Lost Legend that everyone’s talking about even though no one knows what it is. The kids wind up following a wolf named Silverdog deep into the Fantasy Forest section of the woods where they meet Ivanna – the imposing Viking lady on the cover. Ivanna lives in a tiny house with a big, hairy man who acts like a dog named Luka. She’s got the treasure chest that everyone’s looking for, and she’s ready to hand it over as soon as Justin and Marissa pass a “survival test.”
The onslaught of insanity keeps coming at a rapid fire pace when Marissa and Justin inexplicably wake up in the middle of the woods with a pair of backpacks and written instructions to follow Luka in order to pass the test. So, Luka immediately runs off, and the kids are engulfed by an army of mechanical mice. Shortly after they find their way out of that situation, a pair of giant cats show up to eat them. Thankfully, the cats get distracted by the wind-up mice, and the sibling duo find their way back to Ivanna’s cabin only to discover that she’s a wind-up toy as well. It turns out that Luka isn’t a mandog at all; he’s the man behind the Fantasy Forest curtain, and he’s overjoyed to reward the Clarke siblings with the treasure chest they’re in search of.
Mr. Clarke is super excited when his kids show up with the chest – until he opens it up and finds a big ole egg inside. It turns out that the whole survival test ordeal was a silly misunderstanding. Luka doesn’t even have The Lost Legend. That belongs to a community of folks in brown robes who live by the river. The riverfolk don’t stick around long enough for us to find out whether or not they’re living off a steady diet of government cheese, either. As soon as the Clarkes show up, they hand over The Lost Legend, pack up their stuff, and head out.
With their bizarre adventure finally over, the treasure hunting family start to head back to camp, but, when they decide to take a look at The Lost Legend and finally learn what it’s all about, they discover the horrible truth: whoever possesses The Lost Legend will be LOST FOREVER! Oh noooooooo!
I can’t believe how wrong I was. The wall-to-wall, pure, unadulterated madness contained within this book’s pages is quintessential Goosebumps. R.L. Stine may as well be the deranged mandog behind the curtain, and, dammit, Legend of the Lost Legend may be his masterpiece.
And then I saw the twin pairs of yellow eyes.
And I recognized the shapes of the heads. And I knew I was staring at cats.
Cats!
Black cats. Huge heads rising over the trees. Tails curling up like smoke from chimneys.
Two giant black cats, their paws thundering over the forest, shaking the ground and the trees. Their yellow eyes locked on Marissa and me.
I’ll be completely honest. We put out the Halloween decorations and kicked off the near-nightly horror flick routine last month at my house. I even went out and bought all the dogs creeeeeepy pajamas just to make sure they didn’t feel left out of the festivities. I may love Christmas, but I’m hardly oblivious to the fact that Christmas never fails to pelt you with stress snowballs of astonishing sizes year after year after year – no matter how much prep work you do. That’s the whole point of Christmas in July; I get to have the tree and the music and the presents without having to worry about whether or not my mother is going to dump all the juices out of the pot and serve up one of her signature dry roasts at the obligatory Family Christmas Dinner.
There’s really no reason to delay the part of the year when DoubtFire descends into weekly frightfulness, and there’s absolutely no better or more appropriate place to start than with The Real Ghostbusters classic – When Halloween Was Forever.
Ghostbusters and Halloween go together like Randy Savage and Slim Jims, so it’s no surprise that The Real Ghostbusters series pumped out an impressive three Halloween specials during its five-year run. Granted, that number should be higher, but a show that sees four guys facing down a constant onslaught of vampires, goblins, and ghouls each episode doesn’t have any trouble fitting snugly into the spookiest season of the year. It also doesn’t hurt that two of the three specials feature Samhain, and Samhain is awesome.
“Awesome” is an understatement when it comes to Samhain – the “living” embodiment of All Hallow’s Eve. He is to October what Santa Claus is to December. Actually, the pumpkinheaded phantom is much more motivated than Santa because he wants it to be Halloween forever while Claus is perfectly content to work once a year and spend the next 364 days sleeping while his wife takes care of the reindeer and oversees the elves. When Halloween Was Forever shows that you just don’t get that kind of laziness from an entity who’s spent the last 1200 years imprisoned in a big stone clock. He gets right down to business the moment he’s free – eternal night, eternal Halloween!!
Thanks to being all powerful and dark and evil and such, the OG Pumpkin King has dominion over all ghosts, monsters, and other assorted “creatures of the night.” Even Slimer is powerless to resist his influence and is forced to attend the big Eternal Halloween assembly before Samhain detects “the stench of mortals” and comes maddeningly close to destroying the annoying, inarticulate ball of slime and saving the world from the awful Slimer and The Real Ghostbusters rebranding, but, of course, the boys in grey (and brown, and blue, and cyan[totally didn’t have to look that one up]) manage to save him before he’s banished to oblivion by the world’s most enthusiastic trick-or-treater.
When Halloween Was Forever is inarguably one of the best episodes of the series. It squeezes in everything that’s great about the series over the course of its twenty-minute runtime. Goblins who show up at the Firehouse doorstep and send Janine flying across the room when she offers them bonbons? Check. Big clocks that transform in monstrous moon faces to assist with the whole freezing time forever deal? Check. Does the moon clock literally say “bong, bong, bong” at the top of the hour? Of course it does. There’s even a downtown diner with skeleton customers and a skeleton staff that seems a little intense for a kids’ cartoon, but this was a point where The Real Ghostbusters wasn’t afraid to go hard on the horror – nightmares be damned.
One of the best things about the show was getting to see more development with the main characters than the films had time for. Who knew that Peter studied engineering in college until he realized that it had nothing to do with trains and that his father is a lifelong conman, that Ray is from a town that never thought he’d amount to anything, that Winston’s dad is an adamant skeptic who doesn’t approve of his son’s career, or that all of Egon’s relatives have the same too-cool-for-school blond pompadours? You don’t appreciate how effectively this sort of knowledge can enrich your life until it’s laid out in front of you.
There’s no denying that he’s a highlight of the movies (and his absence is the sole reason I’ll never watch the new one), but Egon is the no-questions-asked hero of the show. The team would be helpless without him. Even if he does ultimately squash Samhain’s plans for the Halloween That Never Ends, you can’t be mad at the guy. Dr. Spengler is a character you want to see front and center – saving the day and setting fashion trends while doing it. He realizes that Samhain is a lot like one of R.L. Stine’s zombie vampire ghost creatures and is terrified of light. So, just when we’re on the verge of perpetual monster movie marathons, free candy, and a license to wear a costume 24/7, Egon rigs up a bunch of proton pack-powered spotlights that stun Samhain long enough for the other Ghostbusters to give him a good, old fashioned busting. Thanks, Egon. I guess.
The first of the three Real Ghostbusters Halloween episodes is unquestionably the best. Not only is it the only one produced before Dave Coulier took over as Peter and snatched away the sweet irony of Dr. Venkman sharing a voice with Garfield while being constantly plagued by a food-obsessed green glob of goo, it’s a part of those glorious early episodes that featured Tahiti – a duo of funky twelve-year-olds – on the soundtrack. If you haven’t heard two pre-teens sing about a grooving Frankenstein, then what are you doing? Head to eBay. Get the vinyl. Don’t thank me. The pure unadulterated joy that surges through your body whenever that record spins is payment enough.
When Halloween Was Forever boasts a legendary villain, a killer soundtrack, and the coolest concept for a Halloween Special ever. It’s an episode where Slimer comes tantalizingly close to total destruction, and the Junior Ghostbusters are nowhere to be seen. It doesn’t get any better than that.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #46 – How to Kill a Monster
How to Kill a Monster is one of those stories that leaves you wondering how someone managed to stretch it into a 100+ page book. It is ridiculously simple and not the least bit engaging. However, it does feature a pair of the most irresponsible, reckless, and we-don’t-give-a-damn adults in all of Goosebumps, and that makes it pretty memorable.
Gretchen and her stepbrother Clark are the main characters for this terrifying tale. Stepsiblings are uncharted territory in the world of Goosebumps, but R.L. Stine is all about tearing down conventions and breaking boundaries. The story kicks off with the kids being carted off to the swamp to stay with their grandparents that they haven’t seen in eight years. They’re not even Clark’s real grandparents, but Mom and Dad have business in Atlanta, the city where all of the important adult-only business takes place in these books, and relatives that you barely see are the best babysitters there are.
The kids get dropped off at Grandma Rose and Grandpa Eddie’s house – an oversized mansion described as a castle – after their parents drive the car off a bridge and get stuck in the mud just to show that they’re perfectly capable of driving in the big city. Gretchen and Clark immediately notice that Grandma cooks ridiculously large meals that Grandpa drops off in a mysterious locked room that the stepsiblings are supposed to avoid at all costs. So, of course, the two waste zero time in opening the door and finding a hideous, hairy, hungry swamp monster trapped inside. Before you’ve got a chance to wonder why an elderly couple would have such a thing in their home, the kids find a letter in the kitchen explaining that Eddie and Rose have gone to town to try and find someone to handle their monster of a problem. They even locked their grandchildren in the house because that’s what all loving grandparents do. Gretchen and Eddie will be just fine so long as they stay away from that locked room and don’t let the monster out. Oh no!!
From there, the book becomes an extended chase scene through the massive house. Gretchen and Clark concoct a pie with a drain cleaner, turpentine, and mothball filling in an effort to poison their pursuer, but it turns out that monsters love pie no matter what’s in it. The beast corners the kids and licks Gretchen with its bug-covered tongue, but, instead of eating her, he steps back with a horrified expression on his face and explains that he’s allergic to humans. Then he falls through the kitchen door and dies. Well, that’s convenient. The heroic duo hurry out of the house and make their way into the swamp – planning to walk into town. Clark decides that a swamp walk is the perfect time to open the other letter from Grandma and Grandpa that he’s had in his pocket the whole time. The note advises the kids to stay out of the swamp because the monster’s brothers and sisters are out searching for him – which makes them way better relatives than Grandma Rose and Grandpa Eddie.
We’ve been feeding the creature, slipping food through an opening Grandpa sawed in the bottom of the door. The monster eats a lot. But we had to feed him. We were afraid not to.
We know it’s unfair to run off now. But we’re just going for help. We’ll be back—as soon as we can find someone. Someone who knows what to do with this horrible beast.
Sorry, kids. We really are—but we had to bolt you inside the house. To make sure you didn’t wander into the swamp by yourselves. It’s not safe out there.
Horror movie remakes/reboots/reimaginings/recalibrations/re-whatevers are a mixed bag of precious gold and poisonous snakes with bites that cause instantaneous brain death. Statistically speaking, I’d estimate that the ratio of great remakes to bad remakes is around 1:4, and 2 of the 4 stinkers probably have Rob Zombie’s name attached to them. Well, that’s not really a fair statement. The bearded blowhard only managed to get his hands on Halloween, and I’m (justifiably) lashing out and letting that cloud my judgement. How can you blame me? Not even The Munsters are safe from that madman’s obsession with facial hair and casting his wife. At least he only gave Grandpa a mustache instead of a big bushy beard, though.
Different folks have been trying to get a remake of Hellraiser off the ground ever since the whole “let’s remake everything from the 80s” trend picked up steam, but nothing ever came to fruition. The project was in development hell longer than Freddy vs Jason and only managed to produce two unwatchable direct-to-video sequels solely released so the production studio could retain the rights to the franchise and try to get their act together on the seemingly cursed reboot.
But finally, somehow, someway someone managed to solve the puzzlebox, and a brand new Hellraiser with a brand new Pinhead is ready to hit Hulu just in time for Halloween. This new version promises to be truer to the source material – a short story by Clive Barker called The Hellbound Heart. They’re promoting the hell (ho ho ho) out of the fact that the new Chief Cenobite is more in line with his (or “hers” this time out) original description as a sexless humanoid with a breathy, feminine voice. Based on what I’ve seen, the new version doesn’t look all that different from the old version, but, hey, the first film wasn’t all that different from Barker’s story to begin with.
The first two Hellraiser flicks were the ones most in-line with the author’s initial concept. The Cenobites are background players, and the powerful puzzlebox is simply a means of punishing nasty and corrupt people instead of unleashing world conquering demons. Uncle Frank and his brother’s wife Julia are the first movie’s big bads. Most of the action focuses on Julia luring a series of men to her attic where she tricks them into stripping down to their underwear before murdering them in an effort to restore her former lover after his return from partying with the Cenobites. Ironically enough, Pinhead and his buddies are the ones who save the day from the nefarious couple. They even try to fight off the villainous Dr. Channard in Part 2 but get taken out with ease and stripped of their Cenobite-hood in the process – making it extremely evident that the leather loving crew were regarded as memorable but replaceable secondary players at best. The series swiftly resurrected Pinhead and significantly changed its approach in the third entry and, incidentally, wound up being a lot more fun than its two predecessors. It didn’t take long for Barker to start bemoaning the movies further and further removed from his vision after that, but what does he know, and how can anyone in the world be mad about weaponized CDs?
It’s no surprise that the upcoming remake seems to be focusing all of its marketing on the new Pinhead despite its promise of an accurate adaptation of a story that Pinhead isn’t a significant player in. Male or female, the character looks cool. It’s been the series mascot from the get-go because people aren’t likely to forget the image of someone with a bunch of nails sticking out of their head. Doug Bradley’s Pinhead performance is the most interesting and engaging part of the movies and the only reason they ever made it past the second entry. Clive Barker may not like it, but the films would have been better off as twenty-minute horror anthology episodes if Bradley didn’t pull off leather as well as he did. The first two rely on their visual effects and the fact that Kirsty Cotton is a pretty good character that you’d rather not see get torn to bits by evil hooked chains of doom.
Of course, if the new version really is playing it by the book, then Kirsty Cotton as we know her won’t exist at all because the character isn’t Frank’s niece in The Hellbound Heart. If she remains true to the novella, she’ll go from a daughter desperate to save her father from his corrupt wife and evil brother to a gal who has a thing for Julia’s husband and accidentally stumbles on all the nasty murdering stuff when she mistakenly believes adultery is afoot. Kirsty’s character and the delightfully insane ending are pretty much the only liberties the first Hellraiser took, and the former was a change well worth making since it made the main character much more sympathetic. The ending, on the other hand, sees a dude transform into a big skeletal dragon and fly away with the cursed box. I love it, but its insane brilliance is entirely subjective.
The truth of the matter is that the Hellraiser/Hellbound Heart concept is a niche concept in an already niche genre. Sadomasochists from another plane of reality just aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and, if the series was going to survive and cash in on that beautiful and wonderful 80s horror boom, then it had no other choice than to make Pinhead the star of the show whether or not he was only supposed to be a really cool looking minor character. It’s hilariously ironic that a remake touted as a by-the-book adaptation is already presenting Pinhead as the main attraction. I figure it’ll end up being a case of bait and switch when the final product is released, but it going on and on about the “new” Chief Cenobite is sort of the opposite direction you’d expect from a “hey we actually read the story before we made this!” approach. It’s like saying that you’re going to do a “faithful” version of Jaws and then releasing a trailer with likable characters.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #45 – Ghost Camp
Even though I distinctly remember looking forward to it back in the day, the last title left me feeling like I’d just watched Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. However, any thoughts I may have had of formally declaring myself too old for the series were immediately dismissed by the fact that the next month’s title was going to be a camp story. Goosebumps camp stories are the best Goosebumps stories there are. I knew that as a kid, and I’ve confirmed it as an adult. Ghost Camp is the kind of book that lets you forgive R.L. Stine for his weird obsessions with worms and making kids grow and/or shrink. None of the other summer camp horror stories pack the sheer brutality of Welcome to Camp Nightmare, but they all make stuff like The Beast from the Eastand Monster Blood III seem like they’re not a part of the same series. Ghost Camp is the sort of story I read – past and present tense – these books for.
We kick off with Harry and his younger brother Alex riding an empty bus to Camp Spirit Moon. Alex whines about not getting to go to music camp because he loves singing, but the brothers’ parents waited too late to sign them up for anything other than Camp Spirit Moon. The kids get dropped off and head into what seems to be an empty campground until everyone runs out of the woods to scare the boys. Then they explain that the old “trick the newcomers into thinking the place is deserted” routine is a Sprit Moon tradition – just like the official Spirit Moon battle cry: “YOHHHHHHHHH SPIRITS!” Uncle Marv, the oversized counselor who has absolutely nothing in common whatsoever with Camp Nightmare’s Uncle Al, explains that another time honored Spirit Moon tradition is the big Welcoming Campfire where Harry and Alex get to hear the two camp ghost stories. One’s about a group of kids being eaten alive after accidentally pitching a tent on top of a big monster’s chest, and the other is the lurid story of a deadly black fog that consumed a camp a lot like Spirit Moon (but totally not Spirit Moon) and killed everyone in its path. R.L. Stine isn’t pulling punches this time. We get a story about a group of kids dying in the woods. After story time, Harry keeps seeing all kinds of crazy stuff like the “very pretty” Lucy sticking her arm in the middle of campfire, a kid jamming a pole through his foot, and a girl losing her head in a soccer game. Alex is having a better time. He lands the lead role in the upcoming Sprit Moon musical because Elvis, the other kid who likes singing, is terrible. Despite that, even Alex has to deal with weird stuff like girls pretending to drown in the lake. The brothers can’t help but notice that Something. Just. Isn’t. Right.
In the end, it turns out that the whole murderous fog story is true, and the Spirit Mooners are planning to possess Harry and Alex, so they can live again. The two kids make a run for it but find themselves surrounded by a mob of angry ghosts desperate to escape their eternal campground captivity. All seems lost until the spirits start arguing amongst themselves because no one bothered to discuss who gets to go and who has to stay ahead of time. The ghosts get in a big fight and disappear, and the boys hike towards the road planning to thumb a ride home because total strangers aren’t so bad compared to possessive ghosts. Alex breaks out into song, but he’s lost all of his singing talent because he’s not really Alex….he’s Elvis!
The fog swirled away. Swept over the trees. And vanished.
And the campers sat around the dead campfire. Their eyes blank. Their arms limp at their sides.
By August of 1997, the cable ratings war between World Championship Wrestling and the World Wrestling Federation was at a fever pitch. On the WWF’s Monday Night Raw, Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart were embroiled in a very personal feud that blurred the lines of reality for wrestling fans. On WCW’s flagship Monday Nitro, the villainous New World Order, led by “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan, was running roughshod over the good guys like Lex Luger and Roddy Piper. The reign of terror had reached the point that Ric Flair, once a perennial bad guy, was looking to reform his once infamously bad group The Four Horsemen to make a run at unseating the NWO. By August 25th, It seemed as though the group would be riding high once again, and the New World Order was put on notice. Midway through Monday Nitro, Arn Anderson, Ric Flair, Steve “Mongo” McMichael, Chris Benoit and Curt Hennig would make their way into the ring.
Viewers expected to hear Arn announce the Horsemen were going to take over the wrestling world, just as he first did in 1985. Instead, Arn told the fans that after having four vertebrae fused in his neck, he returned to the gym, where a fellow weightlifter gave him a slap on the back that caused numbness in his left hand. Which led to the revelation that even after the fusion surgery, Arn’s in ring career was over, and he wanted to offer his spot in the Four Horsemen to Curt Hennig. With Ric Flair standing behind Arn through the entire speech fighting back tears, the whole thing seemed so real.
Fans had to accept what Arn was saying was true, and that the reason it felt so real is because it was absolutely real. In the professional wrestling world, in-ring retirements just didn’t happen. There wasn’t enough precious airtime during the Monday ratings war for heartfelt speeches. The days of internet wrestling rumour websites had only recently begun, so it left the fans to speculate on whether the whole retirement speech was as real as it looked and felt, or if this was all a clever ruse by the wily veteran that was “The Enforcer” Arn Anderson. After all, this was still Pro Wrestling. Anything could happen, and oftentimes what played out on screen was wilder than fans could imagine.
One week later, on September 1st, 1997, Monday Nitro was live for the third anniversary episode of the program with a special three-hour show. The first thing viewers saw was a video package of Arn Anderson’s career. As the matches of the night went on, wrestlers on the WCW roster congratulated Arn on his career and sleek highlight packages showed just who Arn Anderson was, and how much he meant to WCW. It really did seem that the retirement was real, but it also seemed like all of this really could be all going to plan for the Horsemen.
Interviewer Gene Okerlund came out to start the third hour of the show by introducing The Four Horsemen. The music played and out came NWO member Syxx, in a cheap blonde wig and oversized rubber nose. Konnan was out next, dressed in a Chicago Bears jacket identical to the one that Steve McMichael wore. The pair introduced “Curt Hennig” who was actually Buff Bagwell in a disguise as bad as the first two “Horsemen” were wearing. Finally, Syxx introduced Arn Anderson.
Out came Kevin Nash, carrying a Styrofoam cooler and wearing a neck brace, with an overstuffed denim shirt, and a balding hairpiece on his head, and the same style of wire rimmed glasses that the real Arn Anderson was known for wearing when he wasn’t wrestling. During this whole debacle, fans waited at the edge of their seats to see the real Horsemen come down the entrance and clean house. Nash took the microphone and mocked Arn for being drunk, and for being old, and for needing his weakened left hand to open a beer. And all the while, neither Arn nor the Horsemen would show up to stop the NWO from running down the WCW roster yet again. The interview/mockery ended, and that was that, and neither Arn nor the Horsemen ever got their payback for the mockery.
As it turns out, Arn Anderson’s retirement, and the heartfelt speech he gave in the ring in front of millions of fans felt so real because it was absolutely real. Arn would lose most of the use of his left arm as a result of injuries sustained from ring ropes breaking twice in 1996. And just one week later Eric Bischoff (the onscreen and offscreen president of WCW) used the speech, one of the most real and wrenching moments in professional wrestling before or since, as fodder for the NWO to make yet another mockery of WCW talent. Calling one of the best in-ring talents ever a decrepit old drunk while the man’s children watched at home.
Arn was so upset he nearly quit the company, and only stayed after Kevin Nash apologised. Ric Flair also used the stunt as further justification to take time off from WCW and wouldn’t reappear for nearly a year during a time when WCW was losing the ratings war to the WWF. Eric Bischoff wouldn’t apologise or even acknowledge the skit was in poor taste for over twenty years. Over the years, it seems all parties have mended fences both publicly and privately.
But twenty-five years later, the segment remains painful to watch. WCW would be shuttered by 2001, and one of the reasons that one of the most successful wrestling companies ever would shut down with a whimper is because segments like this happened on live television without resolution. To this day, Eric Bischoff, the man ultimately responsible for such a tasteless segment, has never been given the opportunity to make a retirement speech in the ring surrounded by his closest friends in professional wrestling. He was never able to achieve the heights of success that he saw in 1997, and he very likely never will. A fact that Arn Anderson likely smiles about every time the two cross paths.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #44 – Say Cheese and Die – Again!
We’re deep into Goosebumps’ original run at this point. Say Cheese and Die – Again! is the 44th entry, and we’ve only got 18 to go. Comparing the later books to the early ones is a lot like looking back at the first season of a show that’s been on for twenty years. There’s a passing resemblance, at best. The stories aren’t nearly as dark and gruesome, and we haven’t gotten to read about flesh rotting off of skulls for quite a while now. So getting a sequel to one of the earliest and most foreboding books is pretty interesting at this juncture. Will the evil camera of doom usher Goosebumps back to its dark and dreary roots? Will we be served up with a heaping plate of necks bent at unnatural angles and mad scientist inventors dying of heart attacks in front of children? Is Stine ready to put the terror back in terrifying?
Of course not!
Say Cheese and Die – Again! picks up with Greg a year after his adventure with the instant camera of doom. Things aren’t going too well for the poor guy. He’s in Mr. “Sourball” Saurs’ English class, and he’s just failed the big class presentation that counts for 50% of his grade by trying to tell the kids all about how he found a camera that made bad things happen to his friends and family. It turns out that the assignment was to tell a true story, and, by golly, Mr. Saurs just plain doesn’t believe any of this prophecy of doom nonsense. Instead of focusing too much on why half of the grade in an English class would come from an oral presentation instead of a writing assignment, Greg is determined to convince his teacher to change his grade by proving that he’s telling the truth – no matter what!
Shari, Bird, and Michael return as Greg’s best friends, but Michel and Bird don’t do or say much of anything because Stine has a really hard time of getting out of the boy/girl duo thing these days. It’s just easier that way. Shari reminds Greg that she vanished into thin air for several days thanks to the cursed camera’s cruelty and that it’s probably a bad idea to dig it back out just for the sake of an English grade. But what does she know? Greg heads over to the creepy old house where he first discovered the camera only to find that it’s been bulldozed and destroyed to make room for new neighbors who aren’t interested in living in creepy old houses. Thankfully, the camera got tossed in a nearby dumpster, and, after a test shot causes a kid to step on a nail, it’s obvious that it’s still working properly.
Greg tries to show Mr. Saurs the nail-in-the-foot picture thinking that, somehow, it will prove that he’s been telling the truth because ol’ Sourball is totally going to take his word that the photo developed before the accident happened. Shockingly, Saurs is having none of it. As if that’s not bad enough, Shari accidentally gets her photo taken, but the camera inexplicably prints out a negative. She snaps Greg’s picture in retaliation, and he looks like “a really gross mountain of pudding” in the resulting photo.
The camera’s work is more or less done now, and we spend the rest of the adventure with Shari gradually shrinking into nothingness while Greg rapidly gains weight by the minute. Mr. Saurs even devotes a few minutes in class to fat shaming the poor boy because teachers in the 90s didn’t care one single bit about your feelings or emotional well-being. The kids wonder if they should tear up the pictures to fix things – which seems pretty reasonable given that this is exactly how Shari returned from the void in the original – but that’s off the table this time because the pair worries it’ll make things worse. Instead, they head to the photo shop where Greg’s older brother works and beg him to develop Shari’s negative print into a positive and Greg’s positive into a negative hoping that this will reverse the evil sizing spell. And it does, too! How about that? Things wrap up with Greg taking the camera back to class to take revenge on Mr. Saurs for all that nasty verbal abuse. But Saurs flips the script by snatching the camera away and snapping the whole class’s picture instead. The story ends with everyone waiting to see what terrible thing will develop next. Muaahahaha!
Ironically enough, even though Say Cheese and Die – Again! is Halloweentown to Say Cheese and Die’s Halloween, the sequel actually wound up becoming the more controversial of the two titles and was heavily edited to get rid of all the negative descriptions of overweightness because comparing fat kids to pudding is just the tiniest bit insensitive. Thanks for the eating disorder, R.L. Stine.
“Greg, I want you to go see the nurse,” Mr. Saur ordered. “I want her to discuss the four food groups with you. I think you’ve been eating too much of all four!”
I was in second grade the first time I laid my hands on a copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The book consisted entirely of retelling of old folklore and urban legends – the hook hanging from the passenger door, the babysitter getting calls from inside the house, the farmer who inexplicably decides to make a soup out of a disembodied big toe until the toe’s former owner shows up….that sort of thing. I loved everything about it. The illustrations were disturbing; the stories were written to read like campfire ghost stories, and it even had a song about how we’re all going to rot in a casket and be consumed by worms when we die. Well, not me. I’ll be cremated and have my ashes put in a golden urn that will, hopefully, rejuvenate The Undertaker’s powers and resurrect his career.
But anyway, I sure liked the Scary Stories books. I managed to grab the sequel, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the following year. I was totally oblivious to the fact that opening this book would send me plummeting into a world of supernatural horror and sheer terror that I’d never escape from. I always loved sequels. What was the worst that could happen?
More Scary Stories had a whole chapter on conjuring up ghosts in the mirror – complete with a subsection devoted to Bloody Mary and warnings about how dangerous it was to summon her. I was obsessed. My old plastic proton pack was safely packed away in my toy box, so it wasn’t like I had much to fear if things were to get out of hand. Bloody Mary was going to find out firsthand that I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost.
As it turned out, I was terrified.
A big diagonal crack inexplicably ran across the bathroom mirror at my friend’s house, and I went screaming into the street. For years, I refused to sleep in a room with an uncovered mirror. I made sure I was safely out of any bathroom before flicking off the lights. I tried to avoid reflections entirely because I was pretty sure that Bloody Mary was just waiting to reach out and snatch me into a horrific parallel mirror dimension sort of like what happens in Let’s Get Invisible! – only not quite as fun.
Eventually I got over it. A little. I still won’t look in a mirror in the dark, but at least I can floss with precision. I’ll always be unnerved by my experience with Malevolent Mary even if no one on Earth believes my wacky cracked mirror story.
Since then, I’ve seen a lot of “evil mirror” movies, but none of them managed to grab me. From Mirrors to Oculus, they all failed to tap into my inner terrified third grader hiding in the backseat of his friend’s mother’s car. So, when I saw that there was a third Urban Legend movie called Bloody Mary, I was cautiously interested. I didn’t expect much, but at least it was going to focus on the old folktale that reduced me to a quivering pile of out-of-date Jell-O back in the day. The Urban Legend movies weren’t exactly the best 90s/early 2000s slashers around, but they were decent-ish, and the first one had Robert Englund, so that’s a win.
Urban Legends: Bloody Mary veers away from the “killer who commits murders based on urban legends” formula of the first two with an all-new “vengeful ghost who commits murders based on urban legends” approach. You’ve really got to admire the writers for being so fearless about taking the series into uncharted territories.
The movie kicks off at a slumber party with three girls – Samantha, Mindy, and Natalie – discussing the tragic tale of Mary Banner – a local high schooler who disappeared the night of the homecoming dance thirty-five years ago. We find out that the football team targeted Mary and her two friends with the tried and true “let’s drug ‘em and leave ‘em in the woods so they’ll be all confused the next morning” prank. For those unfamiliar with this classic bit, you roofey the girls’ punch, load them into the backseat of your car, and gently place them in an undisclosed area for maximum comedic effect. Things go terribly awry when Mary tries to resist and is accidentally knocked out. Her date thinks she’s dead and locks her in an old trunk – never to be seen again. Oh, and she wasn’t actually dead, so she smothers to death in the trunk. That’s the story of Bloody Mary, and, if you say her name in front of a mirror, she’s coming to get you!
Before calling it a night, the three girls chant “Bloody Mary” while looking at the ceiling instead of a mirror or any sort of reflective surface. The next morning, they’re missing! But don’t worry, they weren’t kidnapped by a vengeful spirit of a wronged high schooler. Samantha and pals are also hated by the school’s football players, so they’re drugged, kidnapped, and dropped off in the woods. They’re missing long enough to stir up the locals, but then everybody writes the whole thing off as kids being kids when the girls return unharmed. Everybody except Bloody Mary, that is!
The kids involved in the prank are subjected to terrible, awful, very bad fates that, of course, all come right out of the pages of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The head cheerleader has an army of CGI spiders erupt from her cheek and dies when she decides that carving her face off is the best way to handle the situation. A guy on the team is electrocuted after peeing on an electric fence, and another one wakes up to find his dog hanging in the shower before Mary slices him up with a bottle.
The town decides that Sam is somehow responsible for all of these shenanigans despite the fact that there is zero evidence whatsoever to support such an idea. Weirdly enough, Sam’s own friends seem to turn against her. Why can’t she just take a joke?!
Things all come to a head when its revealed that Sam’s stepfather is the guy who locked Mary in the trunk all those years ago. He kills her brother and tries to do the same to her, but his ghostly homecoming date shows up and gives him a kiss before dragging him into her empty grave forever and ever.
Urban Legends: Bloody Mary manages to be laughably bad and weirdly interesting at the same time. The quality of the acting makes me suspect that they filmed every scene in one take, but damned if I could take my eyes off the movie. The cheek spiders looked like they came out of an old Tomb Raider game, and the whole idea of harmlessly roofeying and kidnapping girls as part of a prank is so ridiculous that I sat through the credits just to see if Vince Russo did any work on the script. Even though I thought about turning the movie off and switching over to Pluto’s Judge Judy Channel for some genuine quality entertainment, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen next. By the time the wicked stepfather hits his daughter with a shovel only to apologize and blame it on “an anger management thing,” I knew I’d made the right decision – even if the movie did have to go and give me second thoughts about looking at my ceiling.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #43 – The Beast from the East
In some respects, The Beast from the East delivers on its title – just not in the way that really matters. Sure, it features a warped and sadistic game of tag called “Beast from the East,” but Bam Bam Bigelow is conspicuously absent from the proceedings, and he is sorely missed. Instead of Bigelow, we get a pack of furry blue monsters (like the guy on the cover) who force a pair of unfortunate, unsuspecting, and unprepared children to take part in a kooky competition with life and death stakes. In a lot of ways, it’s the Goosebumps version of Jumanji.
Ginger Wald – that’s “Wald” not “Wild” – is on a camping trip with her parents and twin younger brothers. She didn’t pay attention when she went to nature camp last summer, so she’s clueless about the great outdoors. Her brothers Nat and Pat look so much alike that their own family can’t tell them apart which seems a little weird but also like an intentional detail that may come into play later. We’ll see. The kids go exploring in the woods, get lost, and find themselves in a bizarre clearing with weird squirrel/rabbit hybrids, blue umbrella-shaped plants, and sticks and moss that leave stains on poor Ginger’s hands when she touches them. The ground starts shaking and a bunch of monsters show up, and Pat hightails it into Parts Unknown – leaving our narrator and her other brother to meet a pack of mean looking beasts who immediately force them into a rousing game of Beast from the East. Ginger begs for a rundown of the rules, but everyone just laughs it off and insists that she’s played the game before because she keeps accidentally succeeding by getting attacked by a pair of snakes for twenty points and scoring a whopping fifty points for the stained hands.
Things go downhill when Nat accidentally touches a “Penalty Rock” and, in accordance with the game’s time-honored rules, gets locked in a “Penalty Cage.” Pat rejoins the story right about the time his brother gets taken out of the picture, but Ginger winds up losing the contest at the last minute thanks to a horribly unfair “we didn’t call Game Over yet” clause. The furry fiends haul the kids off to a giant barbecue pit because “it’s Fleday. On Fleday, we always barbecue.” As Ginger and Pat prepare themselves for a gruesome, painful death, Nat reappears – having heroically escaped the Penalty Cage. The beasts see the twins together and believe that they’re witnessing a “Classic Clone” play. It turns out that only Level Three players can pull off a Classic Clone, and these beasts are mere Level One’ers. That means that the game doesn’t count, so the kids are released and given directions home. But before they get a chance to reunite with their parents and give us a rare Goosebumps happy ending, they bump into a Level Three player who can’t wait for a game. Oh no!!
I can’t say I liked this one too much. It seems like a bunch of weird and gross scenarios loosely strung together by the “game of tag with monsters” concept. That said, it does recreate an iconic scene from Poltergeist when a tree comes to life and tries to chow down on Nat, but, in true Goosebumps fashion, Ginger forces the odious oak to drop her little bro by tickling it. Where do you come up with this stuff, Mr. Stine?
I tickled harder. The branches shook and swayed. The trunk wriggled.
Yes! I thought excitedly. It’s working! I think it is ticklish!
I’ll make this tree collapse with laughter!
I tickled harder. The trunk squirmed under my fingertips.
I glanced up. Nat’s boots poked through the leaves.
I can’t say that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a huge passion for me as a kid. They were there. I was aware of their existence, and I didn’t mind it. I watched the cartoon episodes regularly, but I was always waiting for the credits to roll and for G.I. Joe to start. The neat thing about the Turtles was that, even though I wanted them to hurry up and finish their adventure, I couldn’t help but enjoy the show. It was a snack before the main course. The stakes weren’t nearly as high because I wasn’t as invested, but the stories were fun. An episode like Corporate Raiders from Dimension X is a perfect example of why I still throw on a Turtles episode on a near nightly basis even though I’m too old and should probably take a closer look at the implications behind such behavior. I’m supposed to be reading the Wall Street Journal and having fireside chats about politics and matters of extreme consequence, after all. But an episode like Corporate Raiders from Dimension X makes it abundantly clear that there are many adult lessons present in children’s media. G.I. Joe taught us to get the hell out of a burning house and leave downed power lines alone, The Real Ghostbusters taught us about the dependability of small businesses, and TMNT taught us about the evils of Corporate America.
Everyone in New York is talking about a rapid-fire series of corporate kidnappings courtesy of a mysterious group of men in business suits. Other companies are starting to leave the city, and it’s an all-around bad situation for the economy. The Ninja Turtles don’t care until it all results in a pizza dough shortage, and their order of Moscow Pizza at the Russian Pizza Room consists of a single slice because that’s the best a struggling restaurant can do in the face of a national food shortage.
The Turtles decide that enlisting the help of local psychopath vigilante Casey Jones is the best way to investigate the matter and get something other that single slices on the menu. I’m no expert on the lore, so I’m not sure if it’s just a cartoon thing or something that the movie chose to omit, but Casey is completely unhinged in this series. Leo, Raph, Mike, and Don lure him out by pretending to rob a vending machine – an injustice that no self-respecting neighborhood avenger can overlook. After getting him to settle down, the shelled chevaliers convince the nutcase in the hockey mask (who isn’t avenging his mother but does have a tendency to chill in big city sewers) to infiltrate Squid Inc – the latest recently conquered conglomerate.
So, the vigilante goalie puts on his best suit, fills out an application, and goes directly to the interview process without anyone raising an eyebrow at the fact that the man has not taken off his hockey mask. He’s immediately hired because of his “ruthless violent attitude” and “good old take-charge aggressiveness” – largely thanks to the fact that he breaks the HR manager’s desk in half with a hockey stick. We learn that Squid Inc does Casual Friday all week long when they allow Casey to continue wearing his mask as he goes about his daily routine. The only real catch with the company is that they make their employees attend daily brainwashing seminars to prepare for the “Grand Arising,” but that’s not really a “catch” so much as it is a professional development requirement.
The Turtles arrive on the scene and accidentally discover that a good, old fashioned blast of mop water to the face cures a washed brain every time because, as Michelangelo observes, “there’s nothing like soapy water to make a dude come clean.” This causes one to question how a brainwashing technique with a flaw like that could ever get the green light, but the negligent corporate attitude works to the benefit of the forces of truth, justice, and pizza, and that’s all that matters. Eventually, the good guys are subdued long enough for the big reveal: The President of Squid Inc is Shredder!! And Bebob and Rocksteady are his VPs because degree requirements weren’t such a big deal at the time.
The captured good guys are rounded up along with the rest of the brainwashed employees for the big Grand Arising everyone’s been getting ready for. Bebop and Rocksteady are hilariously selling programs to the big event, and this makes me laugh more than it should. Anyway, it turns out that the whole thing is a big plan to bring the bad guys’ Technodrome (which has nothing in common whatsoever with Cobra’s Terrordrome) to the surface. The ‘Drome being stranded in the center of the Earth is a big plot point at this point in the series, and the villains spend most of the episodes trying to restore it – which makes the big reveal a little like that time it turned out that the Corporate Ministry’s Higher Power was really just Vince McMahon dressed up like a druid.
The Heroes in a Half Shell save the day and de-brainwash all of the paper pushers and executives, and the president vows that, going forward, his company will strive to make the world a better place. Of course, the Turtles aren’t interested in that. They just want to get back to the Russian Pizza Room for a large Moscow Pizza as soon as possible.
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #42 – Egg Monsters From Mars
Egg Monsters from Mars delivers on its title in every way. It’s about a bunch of scrambled egg blobs from Mars and all the trouble they vigorously stir up with some butter, salt and pepper, and just a dash of Worcestershire sauce.
Dana – Don’t Call Him Barrett Cause He’s a Dude – Johnson is our science-loving narrator. He’s got a spoiled younger sister named Brandy who seems like she’s going to be an important part of the story based on the back-cover blurb, but she’s actually just a plot device who pretty much disappears after the first few chapters. Dana’s best friend is the redheaded girl across the street, Anne, but she doesn’t matter either. Aside from titular creatures, the coolest thing about Egg Monsters from Mars is that it’s one of the few entries that deviates from the standard Goosebumps formula.
Brandy’s birthday is the week before Easter, so she wants to have a big birthday egg hunt. Dana finds an oversized, veiny green egg right before the egg hunt devolves into an egg fight because Mr. and Mrs. Johnson “didn’t have time” to paint or even boil the eggs. R.L. Stine really goes out of his way to drive home the idea that adults are either stupid or evil – occasionally both. Dana stashes his discovery in his room because a weird egg with purple veins is the sort of thing you want to put in your sock drawer. The next morning, he’s got his own personal egg monster, and he’s got a shell of a problem!
Figuring that he’s made a huge scientific discovery, Dana heads to the local lab that’s conveniently only three blocks away. He meets a guy named Dr. Gray and learns that his new yolky pal is just one of many, and they’re all from Mars. It seems the big green eggs fell into town meteor shower style, and Dr. Gray managed to gather them up before anyone noticed. The good doctor is happy to add Dana’s contribution to his refrigerated lab full of egg monsters for further study. It seems like everything has been taken care of – until the sneaky scientist reveals that he’ll be keeping Dana stored away for further study, too!
Poor Dana finds himself imprisoned in a freezing lab full of living scrambled eggs overnight. He figures he’ll freeze to death, but all the eggstra terrestrials suddenly converge into one big, warm, oozing blanket of yolk that envelopes our hero and keeps him warm for the night. Dr. Gray returns the next morning and is furious that his child captive touched the monsters even though he locked him a room full of the things with zero idea what they might do. He decides that he’s going to turn down the AC and turn the boy into an ice cube, but then the eggs go Monster Blood on the vile villain and suck him into a massive breakfasty blob while Dana escapes. Back home and out of danger, our hero decides to head over to Anne’s four a rousing game of Battle Chess….but not before taking a minute to squat in the grass and lay “the biggest egg you ever saw” because R.L. Stine is insane.
Dr. Gray turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “We believe the eggs fell all the way from Mars, Dana. There was a big storm on Mars. Two years ago. It set off something like a meteor shower. The storm sent these eggs hurtling throughspace.”
DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS.
Goosebumps #41 – Bad Hare Day
Bad Hare Day was one of those books that I didn’t particularly enjoy when I read it for the first time. I can’t exactly say I hated it this time around. It’s got some genuinely funny parts, but the story is really, really simple and underwhelming. Aside from the magical mischief, the book is a whole lot like Go Eat Worms. It’s about a kid whose obsession with magicianing turns against him thanks to a rude rabbit of ruination.
The story is narrated by Tim – a wannabe magician who is relentlessly beaten and bullied by his Karate-loving little sister, Ginny. Ginny specializes in spoiling her older brother’s impromptu afterschool magic shows by telling everyone how the tricks are done. It’s hard to be mad at her, though, because impromptu afterschool magic shows are just asking for trouble, and it’s better for Tim that the trouble comes from a relative rather than a random bully. Tim’s best friend is a guy named Foz. He has zero impact on the story and is only there because Tim needs someone to talk to other than his sister. Tim and Ginny’s late night excursion to The Midnight Mansion for The Great Amaz-O’s routine sets the plot into motion. Our magic-loving hero winds up getting chosen as a volunteer for the big disappearing trick and winds up in the Mansion’s basement. Reappearing apparently isn’t a part of the act, and Tim is legitimately abandoned and left to wander around even though one has to assume the Mansion’s owners would be liable in the event of an accident. Anyway, Tim finds his way to Amaz-O’s dressing room – only for his hero to snap and tell him to get lost. Tim angrily swipes his former idol’s magical bag of tricks in retaliation because a little thievery is perfectly acceptable under such circumstances. Back home, the bag proves to be a little too magical and floods the house with a barrage of doves, trick snakes, and bouncing red balls. Then Ginny takes a bite of a carrot from the sack and immediately transforms into a rabbit. Oh no!
Tim, Foz, and Rabbit Ginny head back to The Midnight Mansion hoping that Amaz-O will forgive the whole robbery thing and lend a hand. The big twist comes when the kids discover that Amaz-O is actually a life-sized puppet controlled by a rabbit who is actually the real Amaz-O thanks a sinister sorcerer named Frank. The bunny tells the kids that Ginny’s transformation is only temporary, and that’s that. No, really. That’s all there is to it. Ginny and Foz head out, but Amaz-O calls Tim back and offers him a spot in his show that the boy magician is overjoyed to accept. Unfortunately, he doesn’t realize that he’s going to be cast as the new rabbit-in-the-hat until it’s too late, and that’s a wrap.
I don’t know much about R.L Stine, but I can say with confidence that the man loves writing about worms and kids transformed into small animals. Where is I Was a 6th Grade Earthworm, and why haven’t we gotten it yet?
“So be quiet and listen to the story,” Amaz-O, the rabbit, grumbled. “If you’d stop talking you might learn something.”
Amaz-O sure was a grouch.
“Anyway, long story short,” Amaz-O went on. “This sorcerer guy—Frank—”
“A sorcerer named Frank?” I cut in. I didn’t mean to interrupt. It just slipped out.
The rabbit glared at me. “Yes, a sorcerer named Frank. You got a problem with that?”
Doubtfire 