Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (PG)
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This is the sequel to Goosebumps. It seems to me that when I first heard of it, some time before it was released, it had the title I'm using here, but looking at Wikipedia now, it seems that it went through a couple of other titles first. Anyway, when I watched it on DVD, the "Haunted Halloween" part had been dropped from the title, and never appears onscreen. So I'm not really sure if it still had the full title when it was released theatrically, and was only shortened for home video, or if it was shortened for theaters, as well. I guess it doesn't matter; either way, I'm including the full title in my review.

I don't want to say too much about the plot. Basically, two friends named Sonny and Sam find an unfinished R.L. Stine manuscript called "Haunted Halloween", and when they open it, it releases Slappy the dummy, who thinks of the two of them as brothers, at first. But his actions soon become problematic, and they, along with Sonny's older sister Sarah, try to get rid of Slappy. They fail, and their turning against him only makes him mad. So he turns some Halloween costumes into real monsters. Later, he takes over Nikola Tesla's abandoned lab, to transmit his power to bring Halloween decorations all over town to life. (Surely at least some of them were CGI.) So, the three kids have to find a way to stop him and return everything to normal. I suppose I should also mention that the kids have a neighbor named Mr. Chu (Ken Jeong), who is really into Halloween. And there's a store manager named Walter (Chris Parnell), who not only is a potential romantic interest for Sarah and Sonny's mother, he also gets turned into a monster by Slappy. Oh, and Jack Black has some brief scenes as R.L. Stine.

Of course I'm leaving out a lot of details. I just want to say that on the whole, the movie seemed kind of pointless, to me. It wasn't all that different from the first movie, except that it was less interesting. Still, it had some decent bits, and I really liked a twist at the end of the movie. Plus it's always cool for Tesla to play some kind of part in a story, even if he himself doesn't appear in it.