Goosebumps

This was a misstep, or maybe I'm just not the target audience? Idk. Goosebumps lured me in with the books from my childhood and the vision of a fine horror series, but the result is a boring and uninteresting story about a few teenagers, with only extremely marginal use of elements from the original books – about three minutes in each episode. The rest is just a regular fantasy storyline, where the chemistry between the teenagers and their interactions and development is enjoyable, but the rest is very unentertaining. The story is decent, but has nothing to back it up, the horror elements are too weak, the action or suspense is nonexistent, and even the finale sucks. In fact, with more and more episodes, the series slowly lost me, until finally it lost me completely. Fine entertainment for 12 year-olds, but for anyone else a waste of time that brings nothing to the "adult" genre. (17/11/2023)

"A group of friends break into an empty house and find an old camera, but when they use it to take pictures, they discover that the pictures are not nearly what they were taking..." At least that's the official blurb for the original book. Well, considering that we don't get any "magic" with the camera until the last ten minutes, and the whole lot before that is sort of introducing the characters, I'm guessing that the series won't go into the individual books and copy them verbatim, but will fold into a larger whole with the same characters and just compositing the books together, something I wasn't expecting before the screening. Anyway, on the technical aspect of Episode 1, visually you can see the budget and I guess I have nothing negative to say about it, but it will probably be a sort of brainwashing in the form of an infantile spectacle with slightly creepy elements, dominated by a targeting of teen and children audiences rather than being any sort of horror or comedy. That's not to say that it's downright bad, just that you should consider if you are really the target audience or if you’ll just be wasting your time here. I'll give it a chance and see what comes of it. (16/10/2023)

The cards are already clearly dealt - it's one big story with a bunch of teenagers, in which the elements of the individual books will alternate. Episode 2 is about a mask. Technically fine again, but I just can't shake the feeling that it's too superficial and just plain sloppy, as the mask motif plays a role only for five minutes and the rest is more like fleshing out the story and the chemistry between the teenage characters... (17/10/2023)

Finally the series is starting to make sense and I’m starting to understand what the rules are. The plot is unraveling, the tension is even building-up and (I wouldn't have expected to ever say this, but) I'm actually starting to enjoy it quite a bit. (17/10/2023)