Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

Every R.L. Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

Contents

Ranking RL Stine’s many adaptations from Mostly Ghostly, to Goosebumps, to The Haunting Hour, to the brand new, gory, R-rated Fear Street trilogy…

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Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

Kids horror legend RL Stine is back with the Fear Street trilogy, but how do these R-rated slasher horrors rank among his many screen adaptations? Fear Street 1978 is the second of three slasher horrors released by Netflix as the Fear Street trilogy. Dark, gory, and brutal, the Fear Street trilogy is surprisingly adapted from the work of RL Stine.

Stine’s name will be instantly familiar to viewers of a certain vintage. The prolific author was one of the best-selling writers of the ‘90s thanks to the phenomenally successful Goosebumps series and their many spin-offs. Goosebumps were a fusion of horror and comedy perfect for kids who were starting to enjoy scary fiction, but not yet ready for gore and mature themes.

As a wildly successful author, Stine’s work has been brought to life numerous times on screen with varying degrees of success. The villain-ridden Fear Street trilogy is currently enjoying a mostly stellar critical reception, but reviewers have not always been so kind to movies based on Stine’s writing. So, with four television movies, two Goosebumps releases, and the Fear Street trilogy to his name, how do Stine’s movies rank in comparison to each other?

Mostly Ghostly: Who Let the Ghosts Out? (2008)

Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

Young wannabe magician Max encounters a pair of ghosts in his wall, who offers to help him woo a popular girl in exchange for Max assisting them into the afterlife. Unfortunately, Max and this pair of apparitions fall afoul of an evil spirit also living in his walls, who has a diabolical plan in store for Halloween. If that summary sounds like there are too many story strands in this children’s horror movie, that’s because there are. Children’s horror tends to work well when it’s fast-paced, silly, and simple like the deservedly-acclaimed ParaNorman, and Mostly Ghostly: Who Let the Ghosts Out? fails on all three of these fronts.

Mostly Ghostly: Have You Met My Ghoulfriend? (2014)

Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

If you don’t find yourself laughing at the titular pun of Mostly Ghostly: Have You Met My Ghoulfriend?, then this 2014 Disney Channel effort is likely not for you. The formulaic plot of this outing is suspiciously similar to that of its predecessor, with young hero Max having a pair of ghost friends who help him get acquainted with the popular girl at school, only for a dastardly demon to try taking over the world on Halloween, forcing Max and company to stop him. However, where the earlier effort had too much going on, Have You Met My Ghoulfriend? suffers from too little plot. Later Stine adaptations like Fear Street 1994 left viewers with unanswered questions, whereas this effort will leave fans checking their watches as the movie’s interminable padding keeps vamping for a good twenty minutes after the plot is wrapped up.

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Mostly Ghostly: One Night in Doom House (2016)

Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

Unlikely as it may seem, Mostly Ghostly: One Night in Doom House boasts the impressive achievement of being the third in a string of Stine adaptations that centers around a hero named Max. To be fair, that’s because this one is a direct continuation of the last movie in the series, albeit with the hero now recast as Corey Fogelmanis. The best of the Mostly Ghostly movies, this one is nonetheless a predictable, thinly-plotted affair with few laughs or scares.

The Haunting Hour: Don’t Think About It (2007)

Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

Starring child actor Emily Osment at the height of her Hannah Montana fame and the Saw franchise’s Tobin Bell, of all people, The Haunting Hour: Don’t Think About It is a simple and undeniably effective kids horror-comedy from the king of the genre. Osment’s young heroine is a put-upon teen who accidentally unleashes a monster from a cursed book and must save herself and her little brother from the beast before their parents return home. As implied by the movie’s stakes being “mom and dad might find out” and not “we might die,” The Haunting Hour: Don’t Think About It is very much a PG-rated horror, but as far as the genre goes, it’s a solid, silly, and (age-appropriately) scary effort.

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018)

Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween aims for a younger crowd than its predecessor, and could have benefited from keeping Jack Black around in more than a voice role. That said, this sequel does boast the likable star of Stephen King’s It Jeremy Ray Taylor and the heroine of Annabelle Comes Home Madison Iseman as its brother/sister hero duo, and it’s a fast-paced, funny blitzkrieg of horror-comedy antics. All of Stine’s most famous monsters put in an appearance here and Black is a veteran scene-stealer as usual in the role of Slappy the Dummy, making this a sequel that can’t quite match the original but still proves to be one of Stine’s better screen adaptations. A solid effort that only misses out on higher ranking as it lacks the grown-up in-jokes of the earlier outing.

Goosebumps (2015)

Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

Fear Street may be a gory, R-rated adaptation of Stine’s work, but 2015’s Goosebumps still brings a bit of edge to its anarchic family-friendly comedy (any kids film that opens with the hero joking about Guantanamo Bay will always be worth a watch). Future star Dylan Minette is stellar as the troubled teen hero, Jack Black is hilarious as a fictionalized version of Stine, and Ryan Lee steals the movie as Champ, that rarest of beasts—a family film comic relief who is genuinely funny. This meta-comedy sees Minette’s well-meaning teen accidentally unleash the monsters of Stine’s books on a small town in a PG retread of Cabin in the Woods that is silly, fun, fast-paced, and even features a clever, unexpected twist that ties into one of Stine’s best-remembered original novels.

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Fear Street 1994

Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

The first of the Fear Street trilogy is a solid throwback to the mid-‘90s slasher revival, with a Scream-referencing opening kill that does a great job setting the tone for the series. However, it is slow going after that as viewers are introduced to the cast and the trilogy’s mythology across the meditatively-paced opening act of Fear Street 1994. Things kick into gear once Deena, Sam, Kate, Simon, and Josh start being pursued by the witch’s killers, but the character drama of this opening installment isn’t quite as involving as the sequel’s central conflict. That said, Fear Street 1994 does boast a truly shocking final act as well as a few clever, subtle nods to ‘90s media like Josh’s recitation of the Konami Code, making this one of the best Stine adaptations to date.

Fear Street 1978

Every RL Stine Movie Ranked (Including The Fear Street Trilogy)

In an achievement rare for horror movies and almost unheard of in slashers specifically, Fear Street 1978 is a sequel that improves on the original movie in most respects. The tone is darker, the character work is more engaging, and the body count is significantly higher for this story of the Camp Nightwing massacre. A throwback to ‘80s summer camp slashers likes Friday the 13th, this brutal sequel sees Sadie Sink’s heroine start a tentative romance with a camp counselor that is widely interrupted by a slew of gruesome slayings. The mean-spirited tone makes this one a bit dour at times, but the Stephen King-referencing Fear Street 1978 undeniably does justice to the scary stories of both that famous horror author and Stine.

Fear Street 1666

With Fear Street 1666, the Netflix trilogy moves from unusual to unheard-of territory by putting together a slasher franchise whose second sequel is better than both its predecessors. Admittedly, the innovative “miniseries-meets-movie-trilogy” formatting helps here, as Fear Street 1666 can exploit its unique structure to offer a tragic period piece in its first half before switching gears and turning into a crowd-pleasing teen horror effort for its barnstorming ending. The opening half, set in a puritan colony during the titular year, is the shakier of the two, with some accents being a bit uneven and the influence of The Witch and Arthur Miller’s seminal play The Crucible looming large over proceedings.

Still, Fear Street 1666 and its twisty ending provides a more-than-solid story that replaces Miller’s critique of McCarthyism with a tragic story of LGBTQ+ love and radically re-contextualizes the rest of the trilogy, making Fear Street 1978’s events even darker in the process. After that, Fear Street 1666’s latter half is pure crowd-pleasing fun, a terrific love letter to slashers that even finds time for some sly social commentary during its gory thrills. A fitting end to a fine series, Fear Street 1666 can also boast the accolade of being the best RL Stine movie adaptation so far.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/rl-stine-movies-ranked-fear-street/

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