Concessions

Back in 1994 or so, my friends and I were just a little too
old for R.L. Stine’s
Goosebumps. That fact—coinciding
with our discovery of irony about five
seconds earlier—made
the mass-produced children’s horror series (62 books in total)
literally the funniest thing we had ever encountered. Ever. We’d buy
them for each other sarcastically, read them aloud sarcastically,
sarcastically annotate them with hilarious footnotes and
corrections. And you know what? We were totally right. Goosebumps IS
literally the
funniest shit ever. I mean, the titles alone:
Say Cheese and Die!, Night of the Living Dummy, Piano
Lessons Can Be Murder, Say Cheese and Die—Again! Amazing.

The other day, I received a DVD screener with the magnificently
Stine-ian title Mostly Ghostly: Who Let the Ghosts Out? The
terrible rhyme, the timely reference to 1998’s most annoying song, the
complete nonsense… this was clearly the work of Stine.

Even better, Mostly Ghostly: Who Let the Ghosts Out? also
features more than one of my OTHER favorite things to make fun of:
people who are famous for no
reason; very, very low production
values; and nerds. It’s the story of Max, an awkward 11-year-old magic
enthusiast. His dad, John (David DeLuise, son of Dom

DeLuise—you can tell by his gigantic pumpkin-head!) just
wants him to play sports and be masculine. Max is bullied both by his
older brother and some other kid who looks exactly like his

older brother and painfully ignored by the campus hottie, Traci
(Ali Lohan, sister of Lindsay Lohan—you can tell by her
gigantic coke-nostril! Allegedly!).

Max comes into possession of a special magic chant that has the
power to imprison all the world’s ghosts in a totally lame otherworldly
cavern where there’s nothing to do but mill about for all eternity.
Sweet. But pretty soon an evil ghoul named Phears comes out of the wall
and tells Max that he will fucking kill his family if he doesn’t leave
ghosts alone. Sometimes, you see, cackling goblins come out of
Phears’s armpits and perform dirty tricks. Then a couple of stupid
child-ghosts show up. “Where are our paaaaaarents?!” they wail. Then
they help Max get into Ali Lohan’s pants.

MG: WLTGO (available on DVD Sept-ember 30) is sure to
entertain no one. Ghosts will find it offensive. Actual sorcerers
should be insulted. Ali Lohan fans do not exist. And even the
most culturally bankrupt children (you know who you are!) have higher
standards than this. All of which, like I said, makes MG: WLTGO the funniest shit ever. Stine, I hope you’re getting to work on your
next masterpiece, Mostly Ghostly: Who Let the Ghosts
Out—Again?!