Goosebumps: Episode 15 Say Cheese and Die

Just a personal theory: I think I may have found an example of a good actor, playing a bad actor, playing a character, without the makers knowing. Or maybe with. Who knows, really. Director Ron Oliver actually has a pretty long history in children’s television, so I have trouble believing that he was completely unaware when a young Ryan Gosling played Greg Banks, our protagonist, in a dull “read my lines and emote” manner that seems to be copied directly from standard Tales from the Crypt episodes.

A fun fact: This episode was based on a Twilight Zone episode called A Most Unusual Camera, which was also the basis of an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark called The Tale of the Curious Camera. Goosebumps wiki acknowledges this, and as of this writing incorrectly claims that two actors from this episode are shared with the original Twilight Zone episode, but somehow misses the fact that Ron Oliver also directed the Are You Afraid of the Dark version.

This is a pretty fast-moving episode, with a surrealist feel. Greg, and several of his friends, have apparently become interested in a local homeless man nicknamed “Spidey” (Richard McMillan). They decide to break into the abandoned building where he lives, and discover...a camera. It’s weird looking, but they’re able to figure out pretty quickly that it’s basically a Polaroid. Greg takes his friend Bird’s (Akiva David) picture, right before he has a tumble off a flight of stairs...then, Spidey shows up, and they all run. After leaving, Greg is amazed to find that the picture shows Bird falling off the stairs, although Greg is convinced he took the picture before it happened.

To be fair, this is an episode where the short length does help somewhat. We have an evil camera, and it doesn’t take the characters long to figure out that it’s evil. Greg has one nightmare where his family is killed by the camera (or as close as can be implied by a kids’ show), and it causes two disasters. His father’s (Marvin Karon) new car shows up in a picture damaged, after which the family has a near miss, and the father eventually crashes the car alone. He also photographs his friend Shari (Renessa Blitz), who doesn’t show up in her picture at all. He also finds that the camera is undamaged when thrown onto concrete. I can imagine that in a longer film the protagonist would have kept “experimenting.”

There are definitely some weird moments in the episode. The aforementioned dream has Greg taking his family’s picture at a picnic, and then looking at the developed photo to see skeletons standing in their place. Also, he finds out about Shari’s disappearance when two cops (Karen Robinson and Scott Speedman) show up at his house to literally interrogate him without the slightest shred of evidence he had anything to do with the disappearance. That said, it works to get the kiddies hyped up, and as an adult I guess I can just say “meh, surreal” and move on.

The ending of the episode is quite strong, and probably the most memorable part. Greg decides to return the evil camera to the place where he found it, and finds Shari along the way. Apparently she reappeared at her home after he tore up her picture, which makes the camera a lot less impressive, but they continue on their journey.

Back at the abandoned building they’re confronted by Spidey, who gives his villain speech. He’s one of the more interesting villains. He attempted to make a camera that could predict the future, but instead produced one that made horrible futures come to pass. There’s a certain sympathetic touch to the idea that he became homeless to keep the camera hidden and unused when he discovered it was indestructible. However, I can’t see any particular reason he couldn’t have put it in a weight metal box and dropped into the ocean, where it would have likely been undiscovered for a period much longer than his human lifespan.

Overall, though, he comes across as a jackass with some vague notion that he wants to be a good person. He gives us a line about “primitive tribes” believing that cameras can steal souls that I will politely assume was an intentional attempt to paint him as a racist. He also believes, of course, that the two children now know too much and cannot be allowed to leave.

Shari snaps his picture, in a move that’s both surprisingly smart and ruthless for a children’s show protagonist. He disappears, and we see him screaming to be released from inside the camera. The protagonists leave the camera behind, and we get our final scare when two bullies from earlier in the episode find the camera, and take their own picture...and then Spidey is behind them.

I recommend this episode. Each episode of this show seems to have it’s own tone, and here the tone I get is, as I mentioned earlier, very Tales from the Crypt. It’s a scary story, compressed into a product that bears little resemblance to the real world, and I could seriously imagine Crypty laughing and throwing out a few puns (if complaining a bit about the lack of blood, sex, and curse words). It’s cheesy, everyone knows that it’s cheesy, and they make it work.

Goosebumps: Episode 14 It Came from Beneath the Sink

 

 

As the season progresses this show is definitely getting better. This is an episode that’s way better than it has any right to be. I really get the impression that at some stage this was intended to be a throwaway filler (hence the half-hour runtime), and the people involved just decided to give it their all anyway. It also doesn’t hurt that, relative to most of Season One, there’s a disproportionate number of people who are still working. Direct David Winning has dozens of other credits, mostly for television. We also have Katherine “American Mary” Isabelle as our lead, Kat, and Amanda “SG-1” Tapping as her mother.

Our heroine moves into a new house (a few blocks away from her old one, dodging the “new kid” cliché that this show has already used five episodes ago) and finds a mysterious...sponge. The sponge seems to move, and even has a face when no one else is looking, with bright red eyes of evil, and teeth that an orthodontist would hate. Furthermore, a series of strange events begins to occur shortly after Kat finds the sponge.

This is actually a surprisingly subtle point in the episode’s favor. Rather than making the evil overt from the very first moment, they actually build up a series of events that, in isolation, would not be cause for concern. Kat’s mother’s dishes are broken, her brother (Tyrone Savage) cuts his foot, the family dog disappears, and Kat’s bike crashes. The family’s reaction is also fairly realistic. Everyone is concerned, but no one rushes to panic.

Finally, Kat goes to her friend Carlo (Ashley Brown), an X-Files fan who tells her the creature is a “Grool.” The Grool is actually one of the best monsters in concept not just in Goosebumps, but that I’ve ever seen. A living bad luck charm that attaches itself to a person to curse them, and grows stronger by feeding on their bad luck. However, if the Grool is given away, the owner dies, effectively creating a no-win situation.

Honestly, Carlo is one of the best things about this episode. He’s sane enough that you can believe him, but just crazy enough to be a memorable and unique character. All three of the child actors do decently, and are even fairly smart in discussing the logic of the Grool. (They’re legitimately unsure if Kat loaning the Grool out to a science teacher “counts” as giving it away.)

And yes, the Grool is defeated by the Power of Love. It loves bad, so it hates good. However, the episode manages to make the twist work with one addition: even at it’s weakest, the Grool can never die. Instead, it can only be contained. And so, Kat has to spend the rest of her life greeting the Grool every morning, and putting on pleasant music for it to listen to throughout the day. It’s a cute scene, but as an adult I definitely have my doubts that she could maintain this ritual for the next sixty years.

...oh, and then there’s a vampire potato. Such a creature was mentioned earlier in the episode by Carlo, so it gets at least slight set-up, and honestly it’s probably the funniest stinger this show has ever given us. Most of the “twists” are barely even worth addressing. But “vampire potato?” That I want to talk about.

If this episode was presented to me just as a short film, without the context of being a Goosebumps episode, I’d still recommend it. It’s a nice way to spend twenty minutes, and had a lot more talent behind it than most of the episodes in this season combined. Definitely gets a big, fat thumbs up from me.

Goosebumps: Episodes 12-13 Stay Out of the Basement

Stay Out of the Basement, more than any other episode of Goosebumps I’ve seen to date, knows exactly what it is. It’s a goofy throw-back to the silly science fiction of the 1950’s, and it is glorious in its stupidity. I can just see the creators laughing over this script. They even included the line “I think Dad is a mad scientist.”

The premise is that Margaret and Casey (Beki Lantos and Blake McGrath) are being left with their botanist father (Judah Katz) while their mother (Lucy Peacock) is away caring for her sick sister. Their father, however, has been isolated of late, working on some project intended to regain his recently terminated post at the local University.

However, as soon as their mother is away the two go down into the basement, and their father runs up behind them screaming the episode title. Apparently he feels that what’s down in the basement is dangerous, and wants the two to stay away. While the idea of a scientist not allowing his kids into his laboratory is actually far more believable than the insane behavior of most Hollywood science (looking at you new Ninja Turtles franchise), this is easily the last moment of the story that isn’t downright absurd.

The children begin to grow suspicious of their father when Margaret sees him eating plant food, and catches a glimpse of him in the bathroom, having taken off his hat to reveal leaves growing from his head, and was washing off a cut that was bleeding green. To allay their suspicions, their father begins attempting to spend more time with them.

He first explains to this that he’s working on an animal/plant hybrid. This was the scene that convinced me the episode was being intentionally stupid. The process is described as “putting animals cells in a plant.” I really doubt the writers were unfamiliar with the concept of DNA in the 90s.

He also attempts to force them to eat a weird green slop for breakfast. This is treated as insidious in some unspecified way. Even having watched the episode twice I’m not clear on whether or not they would have been harmed by eating it, or if it was just a sign that he failed to recognize the slop as unappetizing to normal humans.

When a family friend from the University (Hrant Alianak) disappears after going down in the basement (the two never saw him leave), they venture down into the basement, which they find now resembles a rainforest, and has plants that can reach out and grab them. I’m not sure exactly how many times the two of them slipped down into the basement over the course of the episode, but it was enough to rob their final descent of any tension, as we already knew more-or-less what was down there.

On their final trip down they discover...their actual father! He explains that some of his blood had mixed with an experiment, resulting in a plant that looked exactly like him, and who was planning to replace humanity with plant copies! Honestly, the reveal wouldn’t have been that far out of place in a black-and-white sci-fi film in the middle of the 20^th century, and here it had me nearly rolling on the floor. If every Goosebumps episode was made this perfectly in imitation of old horror films I would have flown through this season.

The climax is the single goofiest example of “who do I shoot!” I’ve ever seen. Margaret has to decide which “father” to spray with weed killer. Apparently “spray them both and call the Toxin Helpline to see if their real father needs to go to the hospital for skin contact or not” didn’t occur to her, and instead she has to guess from her father calling her “Princess.” Naturally, only he would know to call her this, not the plant copy who as far as we can tell has all of his memories (I mean, it’s not like he had to ask their names or learn English).

Even if you’re not interested in Goosebumps, I’d say check this episode out. It’s fun, and you’re sure to get a few laughs out of it. I don’t remember if it scared me as a kid, but my reaction as an adult is more than enough reason to justify its existence.

Goosebumps: Episode 11 My Hairiest Adventure

Wow, this episode is bad. At least with most Goosebumps episodes I have some idea what the makers were going for. Here, though, I’m clueless. The acting is horrendous, the twist defies logic, and most of the set-up isn’t particularly scary.

Our protagonist, Larry (Aaron Bartkiw), is a member of a terrible rock band with his friends, is constantly chased by dogs, suffers from allergies that require regular shots, and begins to suffer unexpected body hair growth when he tries a bottle of expired instant tan his friends found in a garage. He becomes desperate to hide the hair from his parents, because he doesn’t want to reveal his use of the instant tan.

Let’s break down the problems with this premise: first of all, the dogs just follow Larry. They never behave in a remotely aggressive manner, and when he’s sitting still in front of him they don’t even jump on him. Why is he afraid of these dogs?

Secondly, while never telling adults about your problems is a staple of both this series and children’s entertainment in general, this episode really strains my suspension of disbelief. A child covering up behavior from his parents when he thinks they might view it as irresponsible is one thing, however there’s no particular reason Larry can’t tell his parents about the hair growth without mentioning the instant tan. If he’s already going to the doctor for allergy shots on such a regular basis it’s not like he’d be afraid of a medical professional seeing hair on his arms and legs.

The final problem is a really annoying plot hole in the final twist. Over halfway through the episode Larry suddenly runs into a dog with a gold coin and different color eyes, exactly like his friend and bandmate Lily (Courtney Greig). He finds that Lily has disappeared. He finds in short succession that all of his bandmates have turned into dogs.

The twist: Larry’s doctor (Dan MacDonald) was experimenting with a formula to turn dogs into babies, which he’d been giving Larry in the guise of his allergy shots, but after many years the dogs were reverting to their original states. The episode ends with Larry turning into a dog, and being perfectly happy as one.

The problem, however, is actually in the set-up: The episode uses the dogs and “allergies” as it’s foreshadowing, but somehow fails to make any reference to Larry’s closest friends having the same problem. Why were these issues exclusive to Larry? It’s implied that Lily, at least, is covering up the hair growth, but we see her standing in front of the same dogs who were chasing Larry without any interest in her, and you’d think “we all get regular allergy shots” would be the kind of thing that would come up among childhood friends.

The episode ends with the good doctor making a decision to give up on dogs, and turning Larry’s pet cat into a baby. However, this baby apparently kept cat eyes. I would love to see the episode she goes through.

Seriously, there is no reason to watch this episode except to facepalm. Not a single thing in it makes sense, nothing is scary, and the parents’ acceptance of the boy they raised for twelve years becoming a dog is just absurd! This is a strong contender for the single worst episode of the first season.