Gremlins

Joe Dante, 1984
Rotten Tomatoes score: 84%

While we're on the subject of scary Christmas movies, here's a favorite of every kid I went to school with. I, for one, never saw it until a week ago.

When it comes to movies that everyone but me saw and loved as a kid, I'm always wary of a Christmas Vacation situation, where I am the only person alive who doesn't get what the fuss is all about. But this time, I do get it. I am a little nonplussed by the overwhelmingly positive critical reaction, but I have no trouble seeing why my elementary school peers were obsessed with Gremlins.

Actually, this is the rare case of a Hollywood blockbuster that the critics liked better than the viewers. The audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is only 77%.

Like Batman Returns, this movie was well-received but criticized for being too scary for children. In fact, it's often cited (along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) as the MPAA's impetus for creating the PG-13 rating category. It's fairly mind-boggling that this film was rated PG, since that rating is now reserved for the kiddiest of kiddie movies, but in the early 80s, that was not the case.

What's strange, though, is that the movie starts out in clear PG territory, only to verge closer and closer to R-rated horror as it goes on. It's as if the movie was cobbled together out of a PG script and an R script, and the final product ended up with bits and pieces of each. In fact, I'm prepared to offer that as a serious hypothesis.

Think about it. The main characters, Billy and Kate, look and act like teenagers, but for some reason they're supposed to be adults. Billy lives with his parents, has a rambunctious pet dog that follows him around, butts heads with the curmudgeonly lady down the street, goes to a high school science teacher for advice, and has a teenage crush on Kate. He's even best buds with Corey Feldman. If it weren't for the handful of scenes where you see him working as a bank teller, I would have no doubt that he's supposed to be sixteen. Kate, for her part, works a part-time job at a local bar and grill after school—sorry, I mean after work.

Billy's dad Rand, too, is right out of an 80s kids' movie, what with his wacky inventions and his hapless sales pitches. He blunders into a shop in Chinatown that seems to have been relocated out of a bad western, where the cartoon-character owner sells him a mysterious but adorable creature called a mogwai. The owner's son gives Rand three important warnings: never expose the mogwai to sunlight, never let him get wet, and never feed him after midnight.

As Billy discovers, there are very good reasons for these rules. Sunlight is deadly to the mogwai, water causes him to reproduce by budding, and if he eats after midnight, he transforms into a hideous animatronic creature. Actually, Billy's pet Gizmo never makes the transformation himself—he did in an early draft screenplay—but several dozen of his water-generated duplicates do.

At the same time, the movie transforms from a wacky kiddie film to a gory monster movie. Probably the most memorable scene in the whole picture is where Billy's mom is ambushed by the gremlins at home and has to do battle with them using household appliances. She kills one gremlin in a blender and another in the microwave, and the effects are realistic and moderately disgusting. If I were watching this movie in 1984 with my six-year-old Care-Bear-loving kids, I would probably have started getting nervous after that microwave scene.

The movie is not all that graphic, really, and it gets away with as much as it does because the violence is all committed against puppets rather than people. The gremlins do kill a few humans, but always bloodlessly and off-camera. Actually, I remember one on-screen human death, and it was the only scene in the movie that made me laugh out loud. I know that's a horrible thing to say, but just look at it:

The problem is, once you realize you're watching a movie where it's okay to laugh at an old lady flying through the window on a stair lift, you know you're not watching a movie where you can possibly care about any of the characters. And that's my biggest complaint about Gremlins. I'm not opposed to gallows humor, but it definitely clashes with the lighthearted, corny family film we began with. Maybe that was the point, but I liked it better the way it started. (Remember, I'm the guy who said Bushwhacked was underrated.)

Where was the scene where Billy's scientist pal makes the discovery that helps defeat the gremlins? Or where dad's zany inventions save the day? Why wasn't Corey Feldman involved in the final showdown? Why put Corey Feldman in a movie just to have him sit in a bedroom window doing nothing? (Was Corey Feldman famous in 1984?)

And what was the point of having a crusty World War II veteran neighbor who has a preexisting fear of gremlins? He should have been involved in the finale too, but instead, he was the very first gremlin casualty. Why bother with this character if you're not going to give him so much as an "I told you so" scene? And speaking of World War II gremlins, I think these monsters should have confined themselves entirely to technology-related murders. Gremlins aren't supposed to just maul people to death.

Most baffling of all is the scene where Phoebe Cates relates the story of her father's gruesome death. It's neither scary nor funny—it's just sad—and it has absolutely nothing to do with any other event in the plot. What was the purpose of that? Apparently, Steven Spielberg hated the scene but wasn't willing to pull rank and have it cut.

But enough of these gripes. It's a good movie. It didn't quite know what it wanted to be, but it did a good job of whatever it was doing.

Most of all, Gremlins gave me a sense of nostalgia, even though I never saw it in its own day. It's charmingly unassuming. There is no big picture, no sense of self-importance. It's just a silly movie for the sake of being a silly movie. If they made it today, it would be two and a half hours long and miserably bogged down with teasers for the 75-film Gremlins® Cinematic™ Universe™. Based on the critics' reviews alone, I'd have to say this was overrated, but taking the audience rating into account, I'll settle on

Batman Returns

Tim Burton, 1989
Rotten Tomatoes score: 80%

When I reviewed The Nightmare Before Christmas, I mentioned that Tim Burton had directed two other scary Christmas movies in the 1990s. This is one of them. (The other one is Edward Scissorhands. I wasn't trying to keep anybody in suspense.)

This is also one of those movies where I have no idea why it takes place at Christmas. It was released in June, and the fact that it's Christmas has nothing in particular to do with the plot. And supposedly it was very hot during production, so they had to have huge refrigerated trailers to keep the penguins safe.

Batman Returns, of course, is a sequel to 1989's Batman. But there's very little in terms of continuity. We have a new villain, a new love interest for Bruce Wayne, a new mayor of Gotham City, and even the city itself looks totally different. Apparently, an early script would have brought back Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent, whose absence is unexplained and disappointing. (I think they even wanted to set up Two-Face, which would have been a little much in this already complicated plot.) The same script also would have contained Robin, and I'm glad they thought better of that idea.

Instead of Two-Face, the ringleader of this jolly Yuletide adventure is Christopher Walken as Max Shreck (named after a famous silent film actor, not to be confused with the famous green ogre), a crooked industrialist who plots to install a puppet mayor to facilitate his fraudulent schemes. If I were writing such a story, I might make Shreck a securities fraudster, or maybe a price fixer—after all, the nature of his crime is irrelevant, since the story is really about the cover-up plot—but they went in a different direction. It turns out Shreck has built a power plant that secretly siphons electricity off the grid instead of generating it. I guess you just put it in reverse.

Evidence of Shreck's malfeasance is uncovered by the Penguin, a mysterious sewer-dweller who for some reason is also the boss of a crime syndicate called the Red Triangle Gang. Shreck and the Penguin reach a mutually agreeable solution whereby Shreck will help the Penguin transform from a shadowy weirdo into a mayoral candidate, and the Penguin, once elected, will be Shreck's loyal ally.

Meanwhile, Shreck's nervous, bashful executive secretary Selina Kyle has also learned about the power plant caper, so Shreck throws her out a high-rise window to her expected demise. Unbeknown to Shreck, Selina crashes through a series of conveniently situated awnings and survives the fall. While she lies stunned on the pavement, a swarm of cats gather around her and chew on her fingers. I have no idea what this is about, but it's the most disturbing cat-related scene I've ever witnessed, with the possible exception of this:

Apparently the finger-chewing gives Selina a new lease on life, and she emerges from the ordeal a fearless thrill-seeker. She miraculously transforms a vinyl jacket into enough yardage to form a full-body cat suit and embarks on an ill-defined quest for revenge against Shreck.

All of this mayhem inevitably catches the attention of Batman, who gets around to making a cameo appearance in his own movie so he can use wildly excessive force to defeat the Red Triangle Gang. He suspects that the Penguin and Shreck are behind the gang, but the rest of the city sympathizes with the Penguin, especially after he reveals that his wealthy parents cast him out upon the waters in a basket like Moses, and he was raised by penguins. (Why is there a flock of Penguins inhabiting Gotham City's cavernous, seemingly non-functional sewers?)

The plot goes on and on. Catwoman and the Penguin team up to defeat Batman, while Bruce Wayne simultaneously falls in love with Selina Kyle; the Penguin frames Batman for the murder of a beauty queen; Batman exposes the Penguin's criminal connections in time to spoil the election; the Penguin tries to take revenge by killing all the first-born children of Gotham—remember when they made kids' toys and McDonald's happy meal tie-ins to promote this movie?

Then there's an ending where Batman kills the Penguin and Catwoman kills Shreck, and then you think Catwoman's dead, and then there's a shot where you see that she's still alive. And then she didn't come back in any of the sequels, so I guess she's dead after all.

---

This movie was (justifiably) criticized for being too dark and frightening, but I've always liked that about it. That, of course, makes it even more bizarre that it takes place at Christmastime, but I think bizarre was the name of the game here. According to the making-of DVD features, Tim Burton was reluctant to make a Batman sequel until they gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted with it. He certainly exercised that prerogative—if it had been twenty years later, he would have cast Johnny Depp as Batman and Helena Bonham-Carter as Commissioner Gordon.

Longtime Batman fans were uncomfortable with some of the ways the movie deviates from the comics. They made the Penguin much scarier-looking and more psychopathic, but I don't begrudge them that artistic license. More controversial was the movie Batman's propensity for killing crooks. For some reason, that criticism is usually leveled at Batman Returns in particular, even though he was equally homicidal in the 1989 film.

The writers justified their scripts by saying that 1990s audiences would not accept a hero who ties criminals up and drops them off at city hall. Maybe not, but the Dark Knight series proved that a marginally kinder and gentler Caped Crusader is still accessible to today's jaded viewers. The pendulum seems to have swung the other way lately, as Ben Affleck's bloodthirsty, scruffy-looking, patently unhinged portrayal makes Michael Keaton's version look downright cuddly.

Tim Burton also argued that his darker and edgier Batman harked back to the early comic books of the 1930s, and I can't argue with that:

I have to admit, it's hard enough to root for a hero who dresses like a bat and beats up criminals in the middle of the night, and it doesn't make it any easier when he goes around setting clown-people on fire. Or shooting bad guys in their sleep.

Anyway, there's plenty to like in Batman Returns, from Danny Elfman's haunting music score, to Michelle Pfeiffer decapitating mannequins with a whip, to Pee-Wee Herman as the Penguin's father, to Danny DeVito biting a man's nose and eating an actual raw fish, for real, on camera.

What an iconic holiday image.

Well, I can't say this movie is underrated, because it was quite well-received in spite of its reputation for giving people nightmares. It's good, but

A Bad Moms Christmas

Jon Lucas, Scott Moore, 2017
Rotten Tomatoes score: 27%

I blame Billy Bob Thornton, really. Ever since he starred in Bad Santa, we've been treated to a litany of movie titles beginning with the word "bad". You've got your Bad Teacher, your Bad Grandpa, your Bad News Bears... Oh, sorry, that was a critically-acclaimed Walter Matthau movie from 1976.

Anyway, there was also Bad Moms, the sleeper hit of 2016 that spawned this sequel.

Somehow it seems the word "bad" has been watered down quite a bit in the process. Bad Santa was a truly bad person—a criminal, even—and the story he inhabited was unrepentantly subversive and antisocial. The great accomplishment of that movie was to present this awful person so sympathetically that his half-assed redemption actually feels uplifting. When Bad Santa says, "I beat up some kids today. It made me feel good about myself," it actually makes sense in context.

But the badness of the bad moms mostly just amounts to childishness, and it's haphazard at that. They're generally normal people, but they say cuss words and periodically indulge in a college-student-like obsession with booze and male nudity. Is this "bad" behavior? It's certainly a far cry from looting a department store on Christmas Eve and beating up children. It's the kind of thing we all kidded ourselves into believing was "wild and crazy" when we were 21, but really it was just mildly embarrassing.

---

Well, I don't often review contemporary movies, so I don't usually worry about spoilers. But in case you for whatever reason are considering seeing A Bad Moms Christmas, consider this your warning. That's assuming I can remember the plot.

The three "bad" moms—Amy (Mila Kunis), Kiki (Kristen Bell), and Carla (Kathryn Hahn)—have returned for more hijinks just in time for Christmas. But this time, their own even worse moms (Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines, and Susan Sarandon) have arrived in town to make life miserable for their daughters. Amy's mom is a rich snob hell-bent on making Amy feel like a failure (but adopting a completely random scattershot approach to doing so); Kiki's mom is a dangerously psychotic lunatic who watches her daughter and son-in-law make love from the corner of their bedroom; and Carla's mom is a pitiful, drug-addled drifter who blows into town to bum a few bucks from Carla.

The bad moms try to work off some of their holiday stress by getting drunk in a mall food court in the afternoon (am I missing something, or do mall food courts not serve liquor?) and then giving a department store Santa a lap dance. The problem with this scene—apart from the fact that it isn't funny—is that it's completely out of character. Two of the three bad moms are depicted as basically normal people, but normal people don't do things like this, or even fantasize about doing things like this. The movie makes no pretense of trying to justify this mayhem in terms of plot of character. It's in the movie so it could be in the trailer.

And because the scene was fabricated to generate trailer material rather than to tell any part of a coherent story, there is no need for the other mall patrons to call security to stop the three drunken madwomen, even when they steal a Christmas tree from a Foot Locker. You might think such a senseless act would result in a visit from the police, or at least a raised eyebrow from the dads and kids back home, but no. It serves its "comedic" purpose and is forgotten. The tree itself is seen once in Amy's living room in the immediately following scene, and then never seen or mentioned again.

The conflicts between the moms and the moms' moms continue to tread water for the next hour or so. Amy's mom is dedicated to realizing her own ideal of a perfect Christmas, but she goes about it in a clumsy and inconsistently written way. In one scene, she hires a work crew to build an expensive Disney-World-style animatronic Christmas display, which Amy's children implausibly find exciting (no real kid would give a crap about it), but moments later grandma is the kids' nemesis when she drags them to a production of the original Russian version of the Nutcracker. It's as if she has no motivations of her own and exists solely to create conflict.

Luckily, Amy saves the day by skipping the ballet and taking the kids instead to Sky Zone. (For those like me who were not in the know, Sky Zone is a real-life indoor trampoline park. So the entire scene is an extended product placement, a little bit less intrusive than the Krispy Kreme plot of the Power Rangers movie or the cringe-inducing Dunkaccino commercial in Jack and Jill. Or, hey, does anybody remember Mac and Me?)

Meanwhile, Kiki and her mother go to see a psychotherapist played by Wanda Sykes. The sequence plays like a Goofus and Gallant tutorial on how not to direct a comedy scene. Every time a joke manages to hit the mark, the scene goes right back off the rails moments later. At one point, when Kiki is just about to confront her mother about her disturbing behavior, the mom abruptly announces that she has cancer. Ironically, the movie's unevenness works to its advantage here, because after a half-hour of jarring shifts in tone, we can't be sure this isn't a genuine, ineptly-written plot twist. Then, seconds later, the mom breaks the tension by specifying her condition as "stage-12 heart cancer", which clues us (and Wanda Sykes) in to the desperate manipulation the mom is engaging in.

But for some reason, Kiki, who is not otherwise depicted as stupid, still thinks her mother is telling the truth. Having missed an obvious exit strategy from a joke that really doesn't have any more to give, the screenwriters instead have Kiki's mom admit her deception, then retract the admission, then try again with several more nonexistent diseases. In fact, she spends the rest of the movie retreading this flimsy gag. And once she walks out on the therapy session (in another sloppily-timed bit), Wanda Sykes forgets she's playing a character and launches into a bizarre standup-style put-down of Kiki.

I'm sorry to belabor this one scene at such length, but it illustrates the movie's refusal to follow through with its comedic premises. There is funny stuff in there somewhere, and another rewrite or two might have resulted in a great scene. They just couldn't be bothered.

So that brings us to the final mom, Carla, and her mom, Susan Sarandon. They spend very little time together, aside from the Sky Zone scene and another bit where they steal groceries from patrons on their way out of the supermarket. At first they dust off the old routine of pretending to be charity bell-ringers, but that quickly devolves into physically removing groceries from people's carts.

I have to admit the rapidly escalating ridiculousness of this gag had promise, but once again, the lazy writing and direction get the better of it. Outrageous behavior by the main characters is not funny in and of itself; the humor comes from the way the rest of the world reacts to the outrageous behavior. Here, the victimized patrons just stand there and allow themselves to be mugged—why should they care any more than the filmmakers did?

Apart from that escapade, Carla mostly shares her screen time with Justin Hartley, playing a firefighting stripper in need of a bikini wax. (I forgot to mention that Carla is a professional bikini-waxer at a spa. In her first scene, she refuses to service a rather hirsute young lady, whom she calls "Sasquatch", and passes her over for a senior citizen, whom she calls "Betty White". And that's the scene. They must have been delighted with their day's work. "Well, we've ridiculed hairy people and old people; let's hit that catering table!") The Justin Hartley waxing scene is very, very broad and obvious, but the way the two characters treat it as if it were a conventionally romantic encounter is within arms' length of being funny. But, of course, they go nowhere with it.

There's not much else to mention. I could describe the ending, but there's not much to say except that the moms and the moms' moms make their peace. The one thing I will say is that the reconciliation scene takes place during a Christmas Eve mass, and none of the congregants seem to care that the main characters are having a full-voice conversation in the middle of the church.

In a movie about moms, one thing that seemed conspicuously missing was any interaction between the main characters and their children. I can't even remember which kids belonged to which mom, except for Carla's kid, who is so slow-witted it makes you worry about his mental well-being, but it's supposed to be funny. In addition to kids, Amy has a boyfriend—Jesse—possibly the flattest character in the movie, who is a 100% perfect guy with no flaws whose only purpose is to be the butt of Amy's mom's snobbery.

I guess Jesse's other purpose is to have a child who repeatedly says the F-word. She says it about six times, and at first the joke is that she overheard Amy saying it (in bed), and Amy is embarrassed. Then, she says it a few more times for no comedic purpose, unless you happen to think it's inherently funny when little kids say the F-word. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't offended by this gag. There just wasn't anything funny about it. (Little kids love to say the F-word. That's old news.)

And that about sums up A Bad Moms Christmas. It's not hopelessly unfunny. It's just really, really lazy. Nothing in it made me laugh, but there were a few moments that made me think to myself, "Hey, that was a joke!" Amy's mom had a few scenes that had real potential, like when she turns up the car radio to treat the children to a particularly dissonant snippet of the Russian Nutcracker, or her grudging pseudo-apology in the big reconciliation scene. I liked the decision to allow her character to stay basically unlikable at the end of the story, but I think that was more the product of aimless writing than a conscious choice.

Were they in a rush to get the movie out by Christmas? Or did they just not care? I guess I can't blame them. They couldn't possibly have believed they were making a good movie. They just figured the title alone would draw in enough people to make it financially justified, and any more than the bare minimum of effort would be a waste. I don't disagree.

---

So that concludes my thoughtful, in-depth review of this motion picture. Obviously a person of my exquisite taste and discernment can't enjoy such a commonplace film.

Now to watch Ernest Saves Christmas for the fiftieth time.

Kazaam

Paul Michael Glaser, 1996
Rotten Tomatoes score: 6%

This was the most confusing experience I've ever had watching a kids' movie. And, no, I'm not talking about the bizarre urban legend where people think this was a ripoff of a nonexistent Sinbad movie called "Shazam". I'm talking about the film itself.

The basic premise—basketball great and flat-earth troll Shaquille O'Neal is a magic genie who befriends a tough 90s kid with bad teeth—made perfect sense. But they kept throwing in new characters and subplots without warning or explanation, and the whole thing is cut together with the frenzied pace of a cheap music video. It gave me the feeling that I was watching a 3-hour movie that had to be cut down to 90 minutes in postproduction.

Like most tough 90s kids, our 12-year-old protagonist is named Max, and he has a strained relationship with his single mom. Within the first thirty seconds after the mom character is introduced, we learn that she is about to marry a firefighter named Travis, that Travis desperately wants Max to like him, that Max's mom has not yet finalized her divorce with Max's estranged father, that Max wants to reconnect with the father, and that mom has been trying to hide the fact that the dad has recently returned to New York from some other place.

Meanwhile, while fleeing from some bullies, Max falls through several rotten floors of an abandoned building, lands on the basement floor, and dies. He accidentally turns on a magic boombox, which is secretly inhabited by a 5,000-year-old genie named Kazaam. The genie uses his phenomenal cosmic powers to chase away the bullies and tells Max that he must make three wishes.

Kazaam seems eager to get the wishes over with so he can go back to haunting the magic boom box, so he hurriedly lays out the ground rules: he must grant Max's wishes; he can't show his magic to anyone but Max (a rule he has already violated); and he can only grant "material" wishes, as opposed to "ethereal" wishes. I don't know what that means. Anyway, for no explained reason, he is unable to grant Max's first wish (for a car), so Max blows him off and goes home.

Back in the unrelated dad plot, Max somehow figures out exactly where his dad is working, and he goes looking for him. Dad is a music producer or concert promoter or talent agent or something, and he has it in with famous rapper Da Brat. (Remember Da Brat? She was the musical guest on almost every episode of All That.) When Max finds his dad, the dad is delighted to see his long-lost son and gives him all-access passes to an upcoming concert.

Then, when Max actually attends the concert and tries to talk to his dad, the dad suddenly can't stand the sight of him and orders him away. Apparently, the dad's sudden animosity toward Max is instigated by his boss, Malik, who is really a mob boss, and who wants to steal Kazaam's magic boom box for himself. But then, Max has to steal a concert tape from the recording studio to give it to the school bullies for whatever reason. And Kazaam becomes a rapper and—

Forget it. I can't explain it. I have no idea what was happening. At the end of the movie, Malik murders Max. (I'm serious.) Kazaam wishes for Max to return to life, grants his own wish—even though he explicitly told Max earlier that he cannot raise the dead—and then transforms from a genie into an even more magical being called a jinn. And he also turns Malik into a basketball and... kills him? Does Malik die? Has anyone else seen this movie? Can you explain it to me?

All right, never mind the plot. Kazaam is not as bad as you've heard. Shaquille O'Neal really isn't bad in the part, and I liked the main kid and the mom. The special effects aren't very good, but they didn't bother me. I even kind of liked the in-your-face editing style that whipsaws the viewer from scene to scene without ever letting you catch your breath. But to pull off a style like that, you have to exercise great caution to make sure the basic plot elements don't get lost in the shuffle. Otherwise, people can't follow the story and they get distracted.

...Hey, remember Shaq Fu?

---

Son in Law

Steve Rash, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 21%

It's time to talk about a part of our history that a lot of people prefer to forget. That's right, I'm talking about the brief window in time when millions of Americans repeatedly gave away their hard-earned money in exchange for tickets to Pauly Shore movies.

It's incomprehensible today, and a lot of people were scratching their heads even at the time, but there's no wishing it away. The fact is, this man appeared in movie after movie, and people drove themselves to the theater, bought tickets, and then sat there and looked at the screen for 90 minutes. Encino Man, Jury Duty, In the Army Now (which brought together the first-rate comedy duo of Pauly Shore and Andy Dick)—and then the world woke up, rubbing its eyes like a hungover partygoer realizing what an embarrassing mistake it had made.

Or, as Wikipedia discreetly puts it, "Shore's acting career has declined since the late 1990s."

But all of that is easy for me to say. I was just a little bit too young to jump on the Weasel bandwagon when these movies first came out. I thought Encino Man sounded like a superhero, and the trailer for Son in Law vaguely disquieted me. By the time I was old enough to watch Pauly Shore movies, they had stopped making Pauly Shore movies. I guess I dodged a bullet.

So it's not entirely without surprise and humility that I report that I sort of enjoyed this movie. It's not great, but it's nowhere near as bad as I had been led to expect.

Its greatest strength is Carla Gugino, who plays the real main character, Becky, a bright-eyed valedictorian who leaves her rural South Dakota hometown for the big city when she enrolls in the University of Something or Other in Southern California. Her parents (including the late, underrated Lane Smith as the dad) drive her to L.A., where they are aghast at the freewheeling lifestyle that prevails on campus: bongs, hot pink hairdos, and girls making out with each other are all too much for their small-town sensibilities.

Most shocking of all is Pauly Shore as the resident advisor in Becky's dorm. Crawl (that's his name) is a stoner on the ten-year plan who loves college life so much he changes his major every few weeks. Yet, beneath his scraggly-haired, spandex-clad exterior beats the heart of a... total weirdo. But he's the kind of weirdo who's up for anything and everything and hasn't got a judgmental bone in his body.

So, slowly but surely, Crawl teaches the shy, insecure Becky how to hang loose. She dyes her hair orange, gets a new wardrobe, and starts using the word "buuud-dy". Then, when Thanksgiving rolls around, she returns the favor by inviting Crawl to spend the week with her family.

Crawl is instantly stoked on Becky's cartoon Old McDonald homestead, but her family is not so thrilled with him. This is realistic, because just imagine how your family would react if Pauly Shore came to spend Thanksgiving with you. He spends roughly the second act being actively irritating while Becky's high school boyfriend Travis tries to rekindle their romance.

But Becky has grown up a lot over the past three months, and she doesn't know if she really wants to spend her life with this unlikable jerk whose only purpose in life is to be the designated disfavored romantic rival. (I'm talking about the boyfriend, not Pauly Shore. This guy is less likable than Pauly Shore.) So when she senses that Travis is about to pop the question during a family dinner at the local honky-tonk, she begs Crawl to interrupt him. Unfortunately for everyone, Crawl's only solution is to claim that he and Becky are already engaged.

Now that we know why the movie is called Son in Law, it takes a mostly predictable course. The family is horrified at first, but Crawl gradually wins them over by being slightly less irritating. Meanwhile, Travis plots to win Becky back by enlisting Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, who I guess is his new sort-of girlfriend or something, to tempt Crawl away. But when that doesn't work, Travis and a family farmhand drug Crawl and Tiffani-Amber and leave them asleep in a barn, to fool them into thinking they have slept together while in a drunken stupor.

Yikes.

Once Tiffani-Amber uncovers Travis' extremely disturbing scheme, Crawl resolves the situation by kung-fu kicking him. Now that the family fully accepts their fake relationship, Becky and Crawl tell everyone that they won't be getting married just yet, leaving us to assume they're going to start a real relationship at some future time.

---

I had a lot of unkind things to say about Pauly Shore at the beginning of this review, and let's face it, he's an easy target. But he had some redeeming qualities. (I mean has, I guess. Pauly Shore is not dead.) His Stoney character from Encino Man had a childlike innocence about his obnoxiousness, and even here, he occasionally lets us see that his character is a basically nice guy. He's an oddball who just wants to be himself and wants you to be yourself, too.

The slacker with a heart of gold is an effective character type when it's done well, as it was in Bill and Ted. Just imagine either one of those guys in this part, and you can see what might have been. And both Lane Smith and, most of all, Carla Gugino turn in competent performances. I have no idea what they were thinking with Travis's felony-overkill revenge prank, but overall, it's a movie.

---

Blank Check

Rupert Wainwright, 1994
Rotten Tomatoes score: 11%

What a great tag line they came up with for this poster. "Similar to Home Alone!"

Blank Check is the kind of movie where every plot element seems to have been invented to explain away the implausibility of some other plot element. I think of it as a "Let's Say" plot:

* * * * * * * * *

Let's make a movie where a kid suddenly becomes a millionaire by accident.

Okay, but how could that happen?

Let's say some rich person gives him a blank check without realizing it.

But wouldn't that make the kid a thief?

Well, let's say the rich person is a criminal, so the stealing doesn't seem so wrong.

All right, but hold on—no bank would ever cash a million-dollar check for a kid anyway.

It might if the bank manager is also a criminal, and he thinks the check is part of a money-laundering scam he's running.

And how is this kid going to explain to his parents and friends why he's suddenly rich?

Let's say he invents a cover story about a reclusive millionaire who just moved to town, and everyone believes the money belongs to this millionaire guy instead of the kid.

Good enough. That's a go picture.

* * * * * * * * *

Speaking of plausibility, I saw this movie when I was ten, and even then, it was painfully obvious to me that you could not really buy anywhere near this much stuff with a million-dollar check. Why didn't they make it ten million? But I guess then it would be even more unbelievable that the bank covers this enormous check for a child.

To fill in the gaps in my hypothetical movie pitch above, the hero of this story is Preston Waters, a ten-year-old kid whose nose-to-the-grindstone workaholic dad never gives him a break. He makes Preston share his brand new Macintosh™ computer with his bullying older brothers who have recently started their own business. And when Preston nearly gets run over by a fugitive mob boss named Quigley (Miguel Ferrer), all the dad cares about is that Preston allowed his bike to get damaged in the accident.

What dad doesn't know is that Quigley, desperate to flee the scene before the police showed up, cut Preston a signed blank check to settle the incident. So Preston fills in the check for one million dollars and carries it to his local bank.

Through a preposterous series of coincidences, the money-laundering bank manager (Michael Lerner) assumes that Preston is a courier for Quigley, and he gives the boy a million dollars in small bills. For the next 70 minutes or so, Quigley, the banker, and a hit man named Juice (Tone Lōc) ineffectually chase after Preston while Preston wastes no time spending his windfall on junk food and expensive toys...

...and a mansion, and a private limousine, and catered black-tie parties, and dinner dates. I have to admit, these aren't the things I would have spent a million dollars on when I was a kid. Gene Siskel, in his review, said that Preston should have been spending his money on box seats at baseball games. That strikes me as a very 1950s ideal of boyhood, but I agree that most children are not interested in expensive real estate or fancy restaurants.

Nor are they especially interested in wooing 30-year-old undercover FBI agents (even if they are played by Karen Duffy). And what the heck is Agent Shay Stanley doing going on a date with Preston? She's ostensibly using Preston to get the goods on "Mr. Macintosh", the straw millionaire Preston has dreamed up as a cover story, but this whole subplot is just weird.

I preferred the limo driver played by Rick Ducommun, filling the role of the goofball adult that the kid hero can relate to. The relationship between Preston and Henry is the closest thing this movie has to character development, and the scene at the end where Henry subtly reveals that he knows the truth about Mr. Macintosh just barely misses the mark.

Significantly wider of the mark are the three boneheaded crooks. Characters like this appeared in practically every kids' movie in those days, so I shouldn't be surprised to see them, but nothing about these guys lands. Miguel Ferrer as Quigley is much too sinister—he plays the part well enough, but did we really need a scene where Quigley threatens to throw Preston's loudmouth classmate off a skyscraper? (And what is a skyscraper doing in Nowheresville, Indiana?) Michael Lerner is one of our most underrated actors, but he does nothing but bumble his way through this picture, and Tone Lōc's trademark gravelly voice is phoned in as well.

Before the crooks can corner Preston for a sequence of Home Alone style pratfalls, Preston has to learn a hard lesson about the value of a million dollars. The organizer of his lavish dinner party gives him a $100,000 invoice, which finally breaks the bank of Macintosh. This, of course, raises the plausibility concern I mentioned earlier: it is blatantly obvious that the kid has spent far more than a million dollars up to this point, but the movie wants us to believe that his account has just now run dry.

We even catch a glimpse of Preston's expense report, which is remarkable primarily for the light it sheds on the number of plot changes this movie must have gone through in post-production. Preston's computer screen shows a debit of $300,000 for "Plan 442," which refers to a business project his father was struggling to get off the ground earlier in the movie. Evidently, on some long-forgotten cutting-room floor, there was a scene where Preston had Mr. Macintosh cut his dad a check for 300 grand. This seems like an important plot point, and it's bizarre that the finished movie still briefly alludes to Plan 442, only to drop the subject immediately.

It's also bizarre that the expense report doesn't show the $300,000 Preston spent on the gigantic castle he's been living in. I have to conclude that, in an earlier cut of the film, Preston somehow acquired the house for free and spent that money on dad's business deal. It's also obvious that the exorbitant house party was originally scripted to cost only $10,000, but then, what's 90 thou here or there when you're a one-millionaire?

So the party falls apart when Mr. Macintosh can't foot the bill, and that leaves the house wide open for the villains to chase Preston around while he subjects them to water slides and pitching-machine-fired baseballs to the groin. This sequence only lasts a few minutes, as if they included it solely to satisfy the requirements of the genre. The FBI shows up to spoil the party, and Quigley claims to be the real Mr. Macintosh.

The FBI agents apparently believe him and arrest him for all the terrible, terrible white-collar crimes they suspect Macintosh of committing. This is stupid, because the authorities will very quickly discover that he is a recent prison escapee named Quigley and not an imaginary person named Macintosh, but as long as that happens off-screen, we don't have to care.

---

Overall, I would call this another premise in search of a plot. There's clearly something in this concept, but the movie never quite finds it. Anyway, it's not horrible, so Let's Say it's

Opportunity Knocks

Donald Petrie, 1990
Rotten Tomatoes score: 13%

My usual process for writing a review is to search first for a picture, then for the Wikipedia article. That helps me determine the year of release and the director, and I can refresh my memory about any plot points I've forgotten. Wikipedia also usually reports the Rotten Tomatoes rating, generally under the heading "Reception" or "Release", which is nice because it saves me a trip. But this time, the Reception section is more concise: "Box Office: The movie was not a success." The citation is to a Los Angeles Times article reporting on the breakout success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (I'll have to get around to that some day), which is Wikipedia's only reference for the article.

That's not an auspicious start.

I had never seen or even heard of this movie until 2012, so I guess its reputation has not improved with the passage of time. But I'll bet before its release, people expected it to be a hit. Don't forget, when Wayne's World came out in 1992, Dana Carvey and Mike Myers were both medium-sized stars. That's hard to imagine today, since Myers became a household name with Austin Powers, and Carvey totally dropped out of the spotlight after he left Saturday Night Live. But in 1990, Dana Carvey was considered a really funny guy.

Opportunity Knocks opens on the summertime streets of Chicago, where Eddie (Dana Carvey) and his friend Lou scam two hundred bucks off a reckless driver by doing the old "actually getting hit by a car" con. You know, the old con game where one guy steps into the street and deliberately gets hit by a car, then the other guy comes along and scares the driver into making an on-the-spot settlement. Unfortunately for Eddie and Lou, a loan shark is waiting for them at home. He takes all their money and demands another $700 by tomorrow.

To get the money together, they try the old "pretending to be men from the gas company while you steal a TV from an occupied home" con, but the householder's karate student sons chase them away. Desperate, Lou insists that they graduate from con artists to burglars, and they break into a luxurious suburban home. Inside, they overhear a phone message from a Harvard graduate named Jonathan, reporting that he won't be able to house-sit for the homeowner David (whose answering machine greeting announces for all the world to hear that he's in India for two months).

Unable to pay their debt, the guys arbitrarily decide to steal and trash a car, only to discover it belongs to Sal Nichols (James Tolkan), a local crime boss. They ditch the car, but by the time Nichols locates it, someone has come along and stolen the $60,000 he had stashed in the trunk. Now the heat is really on, so Eddie runs back to rich guy David's to sweat it out. And who should come along the next morning but David's parents Mona and Milt Malkin (Doris Belack and Robert Loggia), who of course mistake Eddie for Jonathan, the Ivy League house-sitter.

So here we are, back in one of my favorite 1990s comedy genres: the "crook pretends to be a decent guy and then becomes a decent guy in spite of himself" movie. Milt, who owns a company that makes restroom air-dryers, is so impressed with "Jonathan" that he hires him to be vice president of marketing. Meanwhile, Eddie for some reason decides that his best bet for getting close to the Malkin fortune is to run a "love con" on Milt's daughter Annie. I have no idea why that would make sense, but it serves the useful purpose of shoehorning an obligatory romantic subplot into the story.

And while that story is rolling toward its predestined conclusion, Nichols the mob boss returns to take his money out of Eddie's hide. Eddie cracks Milt Malkin's safe to pay him off, but then he cons Nichols into giving the money back in a convoluted plot twist that results in Nichols' arrest for destroying an IRS building. Why was this mobster character necessary for the movie? I know they needed a plot device to motivate Eddie to masquerade as a Harvard graduate, but why wasn't the loan shark from act one good enough?

Well, whatever. Eventually, the story comes to a contrived conclusion where the Malkins learn Eddie's true identity. At that point, the conventions of the genre demand a scene where Eddie proves that he has really become the man he was only pretending to be. But it doesn't really happen—instead, Eddie wins Annie's heart back by reprising the old "actually getting hit by a car" con.

Then, like every comedy of its era, it fades to black over a tropical sounding pop song. (What was with that? Remember that "Some Like It Hot" song from Weekend at Bernie's? Or how about "Weather Man" from Groundhog Day? I love that song.)

They tried very hard to work Dana Carvey's mercurial "man of a thousand voices" schtick into this plot, including a preposterous sequence where he does his famous George H.W. Bush impression in a ballpark men's room. But for some reason that I can't quite put my finger on, I find Dana Carvey extraordinarily likable in this role. He has a sort of emotional weightlessness about his performance that reminds me of the guy who played Psych.

This is a pretty forgettable movie, I guess, but I like it. It's miles away from being the worst movie Dana Carvey ever starred in. In the likely event that you've never heard of Opportunity Knocks, I say give it a try.