Rotten Tomatoes score: 75%
Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) has just perfected the world's most astonishing invention: A laser beam that destroys apples. Little does anyone expect, all it takes is an errant baseball to convert this industrial marvel into a shrinking ray.
As Szalinski explains to his skeptical corporate benefactors, all atoms are mostly empty space. His device uses magic to reduce that empty space, shrinking objects to minuscule size. Now, you might think that this would increase the density of matter to that of a neutron star, so that a quarter-inch-tall teenager would still weigh over 100 pounds, but that just shows how little you understand about science.
The Szalinskis seem to be having some sort of thinly established family problems due to Wayne's obsessive habits. His wife Diane is fed up with him, and his kids, Amy and Nick, are stuck managing the household on the weekends. Meanwhile, their next-door neighbors, the Thompsons have their own irrelevant problems. Big Russ Thompson can't relate to his elder son, Russ Junior, who has no interest in sports or fly-fishing.
When young Ron Thompson hits a grand-slam through the Szalinskis' attic window, Russ Junior drags him over to apologize to Nick and Amy and to offer to pay for the repairs. Ron insists on retrieving his baseball, so all four kids ascend to the attic just in time to get accidentally zapped by the shrinking ray. Moments later, Wayne Szalinski returns home from a meeting, frustrated by the cool reception his project has received. He expresses his annoyance by aggressively sweeping window fragments (and, unwittingly, the shrunken children) off the attic floor and into a lawn bag. (This scene makes no sense, but it was necessary to put the kids in a garbage bag so as to move them into the yard, where they can encounter more cinematic hazards.)
It takes Szalinski half the movie to realize he has shrunk the kids, whereupon he embarks on a series of spectacularly futile attempts to find them in the yard. He doesn't want to step on them, so he chooses to stumble around the yard on stilts looking at the grass through a magnifying lens. When this fails, he creates a preposterous contraption to suspend him a foot above the ground, using the television as a counterweight.
Meanwhile, the kids have their microscopic hands full. Amy falls into a trickle of water from a sprinkler, and Russ has to use movie first aid to resuscitate her. Nick gets picked up by a bee and has an allergic reaction to pollen, even though the pollen grains are visibly much too large to fit into his nose. They encounter an ant, which immediately kills them all and takes them back to its nest to be fed to larvae. No, actually the ant allows them to ride on its back. Then it protects them from a scorpion, nobly sacrificing its ant life in the process.
(A scorpion? Where is this movie taking place? Why wasn't it a spider?)
Eventually, the writers realized it was taking too long to get the kids into the house, so the Szalinskis' dog Quark arrives as a canis ex machina to carry them indoors. They make it to the breakfast table, where Nick falls into Wayne's bowl of Cheerios, and Wayne notices him in the nick of time. (I saw the trailer for this movie on TV when I was four years old, and this scene scared the bejesus out of me. I was certain that little bastard was going to get eaten.) Anyway, once Wayne discovers the kids, it doesn't take long for him to return them to normal size.
This was a good kids' movie. We kids loved it at the time, and it still holds up for me. It's funny to see movies from the late 80s and early 90s that still use old-fashioned special effects, realizing that five years later they would be long gone from the movies. They look pretty good, particularly in the ant vs. scorpion sequence.
There were two sequels to this. The first was Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, which deserves the prize for the most misleading title in movie history. (For those not in the know, no child explodes in the movie; he just gets bigger. We were all disappointed.) Later, there was a made-for-TV sequel, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, where the adults are the shrunken ones. I may get around to these some day.
Oh, one other thing. This movie was filmed in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Vancouver, and Mexico City. Considering that nearly every scene takes place either in the house or on a special-effects sound stage, this multiplicity of locations puzzles me.
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