Invaders from the Big Screen was the twenty-ninth book in the Give Yourself Goosebumps gamebook series. It was preceded by Night of a Thousand Claws and followed by You're Plant Food!
The cover consisted of a huge brown gorilla popping out of a movie screen and reaching for a horrified audience in a movie theater. The tagline was, "He's one mad monkey!"
It was released in July 1998 and was 137 pages long.
Plot
You visit a movie theater with your friend, Laura. Whichever movie you watch, the characters nonetheless come to life. The initial choice is between watching a King Kong-style monster film, an espionage spy thriller, and vampire horror flick. A puzzle involving musical notes is included in the book.
Films
- Going Ape (in Blastovision)
- Agent Z vs. Dr. Aqua
- House of a Hundred Horrors
Bad Endings
- You and Laura get covered with smelly perfume to attract the ape, but you attract a stampede of every animal in the jungle. It's implied that they trample you.
- When you and your friends rescue Aunt Kitty, vampire bats bite all of you and turn you into horror movie vampires. Then you realize that Aunt Kitty is probably a vampire and now she is free to attack innocent people.
- You accidentally turn the wrong way of a water valve, increasing the water pressure. You and Laura are stuck in the laundromat, with water rising and washers exploding.
- You and Laura wind up in the preview for Agent Z vs. Dr. Aqua and get eaten by "humanigators" (humanoid alligator mutants).
- You and Laura get locked in a small room filled with uneatable popcorn and water slowly seeping through.
- An eyeless painting stops time for you and Laura.
- You run out of quarters for the dryers. You and Laura are stuck in the steamy laundromat, with water rising.
- You and Laura inadvertently rescue the humanigators from Dr. Aqua, but they keep the both of you prisoner, anyway. They make you take them on a sight-seeing cruise to see swamps. You also never leave the movie.
- John and Wendy are vampires and snatch both pairs of 3-D glasses from you. There is no one left to bite in their world, so they want to get new victims in a new world, your world. They put them on and they vanish, leaving you and Laura trapped in the movie.
- You refuse to take the talking ape to the real world with you and Laura, but he sneakily goes along anyway. He becomes famous and Laura becomes his manager. You get nothing, because the ape is angry at you for trying to leave him behind.
- The humanigators notice that you aren't a real humanigator and that you're only wearing a costume. It's implied that they eat you.
- You accidentally knock a plugged-in television set into water, where you're at. You and Laura get electrocuted by one, which the television set isn't working.
- Just as you find the 3-D glasses, the ape's foot squashes you and Laura flat.
- You and Laura encounter movie vampires making extra money, playing savages in the jungle flick. It's implied that they drink your blood and Laura's.
- While you and Laura attempt to rescue the ape, you accidentally get the snake's attention and he goes after you and Laura.
- When you and Laura run away from the ape, he loses his balance and falls on the both of you.
- A man promises to show you and Laura the way out, but he brings the both of you to his home instead, a crypt, which is full of coffins. As he disappears into a coffin to sleep, you and Laura find out you're locked in. Worse, this turns out to be the end of the movie.
- A fanged monster pulls you into the Helter-Skelter drawer.
- You and Laura bring the talking ape into the real world with the both of you. Your parents are eventually won over by the ape. Then you get annoyed, when he starts to copy everything you do.
- Laura and the twins are hypnotized into killing you. You knock down the top that is causing hypnotism, but it pops back up again.
- It is implied that a snake squeezes you and Laura to death.
- You and Laura jump from the ape's hand and it's unlikely that the both of you survived. Even if you did, you'd still have to deal with man-eating critters, whose nests you would land on.
- You play the wrong set of keys on the piano. You and Laura end up getting destroyed by the killer musical instruments.
Good Endings
- You and Laura stop the Flooding Device. Agent Z gives both of you each a pair of his trademark sunglasses, before you and Laura leave the movie.
- You and Laura help the hunter capture the ape and he gives both of you your 3-D glasses back. You two put them on and get transported back to the movie theater, only it has a cheering audience now. Laura gets an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but you get an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Role.
- You and Laura save Aunt Kitty, by destroying the two vampires, John and Wendy. She finds your 3-D glasses for you and asks you to stop by, except during a full moon. As you and Laura gets transported back to the real world, you could've sworn Aunt Kitty howled.
- You and your friends find Aunt Kitty, who happened to be the old lady at the movie theater, and now helps you get back to the movie theater, on the screen, Aunt Kitty says, "See you soon," with the twins adding, "Real soon." As you leave the movie theater, you see a poster for the sequel to the movie you just escaped from.
- You stop Dr. Aqua in the real world. But in the process, you wiped the movie from existence.
Trivia
- There are twenty-three bad endings and five good endings.
- The movie the people in the audience are watching appears to be King Kong.
- There is a choice in this book which asks the reader if he or she knows what a "prince-nez" is. Oddly, it is answering incorrectly that leads to the more positive storyline, as knowing the answer reveals a bad surprise ending. It is possible that R.L. Stine assumed that children of the target age would not know the answer, and tried to catch out the ones that lied and said they did. But it is somewhat unfair to the children that do genuinely know the answer.
- in Goosebumps: The Game, at the malls movie theater, one of the movies is called, "Going Ape (In Blastovision)