R.L. Stine’s tween-targeting scary stories get a fittingly juvenile – if unintentionally self-critical – adaptation courtesy of “Goosebumps,” a film that assembles many of the author’s most memorable creations with noisy, tossed-off sloppiness. The second straight pairing between director Rob Letterman and his “Gulliver’s Travels” headliner Jack Black, this frantic muddle of an adventure assumes that kids will so easily recognize and comprehend its cast of archetypes that no character development is necessary. Consequently, it spends most of its time indulging in CG craziness that’s only matched in sheer, uninhibited intensity by the mugging of its star. Introduced making pursed-lipped threats from a window (and then, shortly thereafter, from between a fence’s slats), Black is a runaway cartoon as the children’s-lit novelist, overacting as if he were being paid by the wacky facial expression.
If so, he must have been compensated handsomely, because “Goosebumps” never wastes a...
