After the disappointing turns of The Dark Is Rising and The Golden Compass, it was with a natural sense of trepidation that I walked in The Spiderwick Chronicles. So many fantasy books, which I’m sure are perfectly well-told tales when read off the written page, have been turned into mediocre movies as of late, all in attempt to catch that same fire that the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series have. Based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, the Spiderwick movie surprises as a genuinely funny, frightening and adventurous movie.

The Spiderwick of the title is Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn), a naturalist that created a book referencing all the magical creatures that wander the woods outside his country estate. Some 80 years after Spiderwick’s disappearance, his family returns to the home; mom Helen (Mary Louise Parker) has moved her daughter Mallory (Sarah Bolger) and twin boys Jared and Simon (Freddie Highmore) into the house after a bitter divorce. Jared, the problem child of the trio, discovers Spiderwick’s book and inadvertently attracts the more darker side of the force creatures from the woods, like the ogre Mulgarath who wants the book and use it to destroy the world.

So the set-up is pretty simple, making the movie fairly easy to get into. Unlike The Golden Compass, there’s no complex extemporizing about the world the film takes place in and as opposed to the Dark is Rising, it spends a lot of time with the characters before the action starts. Those movies were also all about the franchise opportunities and the potential to make a mint over several films or at least a trilogy. Refreshingly, Spiderwick stands alone as a complete story, yet it is plausible that the adventures could continue in subsequent films.

Also invigorating is the way that Spiderwick feels like an old school 80s family fantasy, like The Goonies or Labyrinth. There’s some really dark stuff in it, not the least of which is Raggedy-looking Nick Nolte as Mulgarath’s human form. And yeah, there’s also the freaky, fish-faced goblins that explode when exposed to tomato sauce (both facets are nice nods to Gremlins by the way), but the fact of the matter is that the really scary stuff is of the all too human variety. The screenwriters and director Mark Waters (Mean Girls) take the divorce subplot very seriously and it becomes a major theme in the story. In the very best tradition of Spielberg-produced family fare, the fantastical and the familiar are seamlessly combined.

The kids were good. Freddie Highmore as the two very different twin brothers and Sarah Bolger too as the older sister; I’ve always said that we need to see more kids in fencing, it’s a useful skill for when evil fantasy creatures come out of the woodwork. Parker does pretty well in the thankless role of the oblivious mom; she’s certainly a much better parent than she is in Weeds. A couple of well known voices also contribute to the CGI characters, Seth Rogen is the perpetually hungry hobgoblin Hogsqueal and Martin Short takes it down a notch to play a brownie named Thimbletack.