Not Quite Human

Steven Hilliard Stern, 1987
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 36%

As this was a TV movie, Rotten Tomatoes gives me only an audience rating. I don't know what kind of grouches gave it such a low rating, but they were clearly never children.

Frankly, I wonder how many people even remember this. I saw it on VHS in the early 90s, then promptly forgot about it for 20 years until someone uploaded it to YouTube. Now anyone can enjoy the antics of Alan Thicke, Bug from Uncle Buck, and Teen Witch, united together in one star-studded blockbuster.

If you ever wondered what the dad from Growing Pains would have been like if he were a genius inventor, but otherwise had exactly the same bland, generic personality, this movie has your answer. His name is Dr. Jonas Carson, and he has finally completed his life's work: Chip, a walking, talking teenage android with perfect artificial intelligence (Jay Underwood). Chip is a cheerful and gregarious robot, but he's not quite human—he is oblivious to subtlety and idiomatic speech. For some reason a lot of androids seem to have that problem in the movies.

Carson's daughter Becky (Robin Lively) thinks her robo-brother is cool, but she is frustrated by his intrusion into her social life. For no conceivable reason, Carson decides that the world must believe that Chip is a real boy, so the family packs up and moves to a new town, where Carson gets a job as a science teacher. Little does he realize, his former employer Vogel (a misanthropic war buff and toy manufacturer who hates the Carsons) wants to kidnap Chip and sell his designs to the Russians, or something.

(All this sounds like the kind of story a 10-year-old kid would make up for a comic book drawn on loose-leaf paper, where every plot element is just whatever first comes to mind. What could a scientist do for a day job? Be a science teacher! Who would want to steal an android? A guy who makes army toys! What reason could they have for keeping the robot a secret? Who cares?)

The storyline about Vogel and his henchman trying to kidnap Chip is put on the back burner while Chip and Becky struggle to get along in their new school. All the other high school characters function purely as plot devices, with few coherent personality traits. Sasha Mitchell from Step by Step plays a dream-hunk who haphazardly vacillates between affection and indifference toward Becky. Chip (programmed to protect humans) rescues a dweeby guy from a bully, but the dweeb immediately turns his back on Chip as soon as the plot calls for an interpersonal conflict. The best-realized secondary character is Erin, a girl who is charmed by Chip's robotic quirkiness and inability to understand slang.

When the crooks finally show up to steal Chip, the plot clumsily switches gears while Becky and Carson try to rescue him. The bad guys need a secret password to reprogram Chip, so they trap Becky and her dad in a junkyard and threaten to activate Chip's self-destruct mechanism unless Carson discloses it. The password turns out to be "CARSON" (I guess "PASSWORD1" was too many characters), but Chip cleverly escapes reprogramming by trapping one of the villains in a box.

But Chip has only moments to act, because the van imprisoning Carson and Becky has been thrown into a car-crusher at the junkyard! Keep in mind, the criminals did not put the van in the crusher; some junkyard employee just so happened to wander along and decide to crush this particular van at this exact moment. Anyway, Chip saves the day, and the family is free to go about their unnecessary ruse of passing off an android as a high school student.

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I was surprised to learn that Not Quite Human was originally a book series by Seth McEvoy. There were six books, all published between 1985 and 1986. I thought only Goosebump books could be speed-written at that rate.

This was followed by two sequels: Not Quite Human II, in which Chip goes to college and meets a female not-quite-human; and Still Not Quite Human, featuring a robotic Alan Thicke. (There's a joke to be made here at Alan Thicke's expense, but I'm going to take the high road. The man wrote the Diff'rent Strokes theme song; let's show some respect.)

Overall, you get no less and no more than you expect from a made-for-TV family comedy. Jay Underwood does an excellent job of portraying what you intuitively expect a teenage robot to act like, and I'm sure today's kids would find him amusing.

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Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

Joe Johnston, 1989
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.

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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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Liar Liar

Tom Shadyac, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%

This movie was made to answer a burning question: What if Jim Carrey starred in another movie? Would it make 300 million dollars?

The answer, of course, was yes.

Secondarily, the movie asked another question: What would life be like if you couldn't tell a lie? To answer that question, the movie introduces us to Jim Carrey as Fletcher Reede, a cynical and unethical lawyer who Doesn't Spend Enough Time with His Son. His ex-wife Audrey (Maura Tierney) is at her wits' end with Fletcher's flakiness and dishonesty, and she wants to move away to Boston with her fiancé Jerry (Cary Elwes) and take young Max (not portrayed by Alex D. Linz) along.

On Max's fifth birthday, after Fletcher breaks yet another promise to visit, Max makes a wish that for 24 hours Fletcher will be incapable of lying. Remarkably, the wish comes true, but fortunately Fletcher retains his ability to mug to the camera and say wacky catchphrases. But if Fletcher is forced to speak the truth, how will he go about his job of unscrupulously flouting sundry rules of professional responsibility?

After a series of increasingly zany setbacks, Fletcher discovers a convenient technicality that enables his client to win her case without lying. In the process, he discovers the true meaning of fatherhood, and resolves to stop Audrey and Max from moving to Boston. He exploits the laxity of pre-9/11 airport security to hijack a mobile stairway and drive it down a runway at the takeoff speed of a 737. (Those were the good old days, huh?) This extreme deviant behavior is exactly what was needed to convince Audrey that Fletcher can be a decent father, so she decides to stay in L.A.

This is a great example of a movie that starts with a clever premise and then actually makes it work. The strategy seems to have been to stick Jim Carrey into every situation where a normal person would feel compelled to lie: A one-night stand, a traffic stop, a meeting with your boss, a phone call from your mother, and of course, identifying the color of a pen. These scenes are funny, and the movie wisely avoids doing much else. I shudder to think what might have been if they had made the kid anything other than the plot device he is. Because the jokes work well, the moral character development scenes are easy to swallow. (And the line "I hold myself in contempt" is a very enjoyable play on words.)

Finally, also deserving of mention is the fact that this is one of many movies that has forced poor Cary Elwes to struggle with an American accent. Why couldn't Jerry have been English?

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Mrs. Doubtfire

Chris Columbus, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 71%

With the recent announcement of an upcoming Mrs. Doubtfire sequel, I figured it was time to consider the original. This hilarious romp is the tale of two dangerously unfit parents: A father whose delusions and obsessions drive him to spy on his ex-wife and children in disguise, and a mother so stupid she doesn't realize that the 6-foot-tall sexagenarian nanny in her midst looks and sounds exactly like Robin Williams.

Sally Field plays Miranda Hillard, a mother of three in San Francisco who is fed up with her lout of a husband, Daniel. As the movie begins, Daniel is fired from his job of pointlessly re-dubbing all the dialogue in 1940s-era cartoons. Soon enough, his marriage falls apart too, because Miranda is tired of his unreliability and his habit of throwing goat-themed parties for the kids. Daniel fares poorly in the divorce after the family court correctly perceives his spectacular incompetence as a father (and as a functioning adult in society). Miranda ends up with full custody of the children, unless and until Daniel can get his act together and land a new job.

So Daniel does what anybody would do in his situation—he disguises himself as an elderly Englishwoman named Mrs. Doutfire and takes a job as Miranda's housekeeper. (The sequence where Daniel's brother, Harvey Fierstein, helps him create his cross-dressing persona was totally lost on me as an 8-year-old, but I have grown to appreciate it.) It would be unfair to characterize this disguise as transparent, but Miranda and her kids must be close to Lois Lane levels of obliviousness not to recognize the man they've lived with for years underneath the wig and make-up.

Somehow Daniel manages to find enough time away from his day job to work as a gofer at a local TV station. He performs a manic, paleontologically inaccurate stand-up routine about dinosaurs, which the station owner happens to overhear. Confusing "children" with "your parents in the 70s," Mr. Lundy decides Daniel would be perfect to host a children's TV show, so he arranges a dinner meeting. Meanwhile, Miranda has developed a relationship with James Bond, much to Daniel's chagrin, and they have invited Mrs. Doubtfire to a family dinner at exactly the same restaurant at exactly the same time.

This leads to a Fred Flintstone escapade where Daniel has to repeatedly change back and forth from his hundreds of pounds of Mrs. Doubtfire make-up into the tasteful red real estate agent's blazer he's wearing to impress his boss. He suffers two wardrobe malfunctions: First, he goes to Mr. Lundy's table dressed as Mrs. Doubtfire, and when questioned, he explains that this is the character he will be playing on the children's show. Second, he has to use the Heimlich maneuver to rescue Pierce Brosnan from choking, and in the process loses his mask and wig.

Now that the awful truth is out, Miranda is furious at first. But eventually she realizes that her children are better off if they can spend time with their father now and then, so the two of them come to an arrangement. The movie ends with Mrs. Doubtfire appearing on a Mister Rogers style TV show, giving reassurance to a young letter-writer whose parents are divorced.

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This movie reminds me of two other movies about divorced parents, The Santa Clause and Liar, Liar. All three are great, and all of them had a lot of material that went over my head the first time around. Of the three, the only one where the parents get back together in the end is Liar, Liar. I think that's a cop-out ending, but on the other hand that movie was less sappy than Mrs. Doubtfire. I'm not sure which is better. I guess that one's next.

Ghost Rider

Mark Steven Johnson, 2007
Rotten Tomatoes score: 27%

This Marvel superhero movie was released in February 2007, which was the first sign that it would not be a smash-hit. Superhero movies are the epitome of the summer blockbuster, so releasing one in late winter would seem to indicate a lack of faith in its blockbusting capabilities. And sure enough, Ghost Rider did not measure up to the Spider-Man and X-Men movies that went before it.

But you know, this movie is not awful. It's okay. And that's not such a small accomplishment in my book.

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The story revolves around Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcyclist in the tradition of Evel Knievel and Homer Simpson, who sells his soul to the devil to save his sick father's life. The devil (called Mephistopheles and played by Peter Fonda) cures Johnny's father, but then causes him to die in an accident the next day. Johnny is angry, but Mephistopheles insists that he has upheld his end of the agreement, and that he will one day come a-calling on Johnny's soul.

(Why does the devil always do things like this? He's not going to get any decent word-of-mouth at this rate.)

Years later, we meet Johnny as an adult. I'm assuming there was a deleted scene where the devil removes Johnny's face and replaces it with Nicolas Cage, like in Face/Off; otherwise I'm at a loss to explain why he looks absolutely nothing like he did in the prologue.

His best bud, Donal Logue (who I always find really likable, but I can't put my finger on why), is at his wits' end with Johnny's outlandishly dangerous stunts. Johnny knows that Mephistopheles' unholy power prevents him from dying before he fulfills his end of their bargain, so he recklessly undertakes bike stunts that would make Super Dave Osborne blush. At one such extravaganza, he finds himself face-to-face with his high school sweetheart Roxanne (Eva Mendes).

Unfortunately, their efforts to rekindle their romance are stymied by the arrival of Mephistopheles' evil son Blackheart upon the earth. Blackheart is a being so dangerous that even the devil himself wants him stopped. Apparently, Blackheart wants to collect on a hundred-year-old contract that will give him the power of a thousand damned souls. It's pretty serious.

Mephistopheles commands Johnny to do battle against Blackheart by becoming the Ghost Rider, a fire skeleton monster that rides a magic motorcycle. The Ghost Rider has the power to turn people's eyes into brimstone or something, although I'm not sure why he wants to. He also has a fiery chain that he uses to kill Blackheart's evil angel friends.

When Blackheart murders Donal and kidnaps Roxanne, Ghost Rider seeks help from Sam Elliott, playing exactly the same role as in The Big Lebowski. Sam Elliott disappears after completing his four minutes of screen time, and Johnny rather unspectacularly kills Blackheart and saves the day. Having discharged his contractual duties, Johnny chooses to remain the Ghost Rider to fight for right.

Like I said before, this movie is all right. It isn't good, but it's easy to sit through, and what more can you really ask for?

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All right, look.

There is a sequel to this movie. It's called Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 18%. Please, please, please do not see this movie. It is awful. It is absolutely dreadful. I detest this movie.

It was directed by an entity known as "Neveldine/Taylor" and Nic Cage returns to the role. No other cast members return. As a matter of fact, calling it a "sequel" is misleading, since it in no way follows the plot of the first movie. What plot there is is incomprehensible. The characters' actions bear no correspondence to human behavior, and the dialogue consists of a series of random, meaningless sentences in the English language. If the movie had been in Hungarian, I don't think I would have noticed the difference. There are scenes where Nicolas Cage just stares at the camera and makes funny faces while riding his motorcycle, with no context or explanation.

This is an unspeakable monstrosity of a movie.

A character that seems to be the villain is played by Ciaran Hinds. The prevailing hypothesis is that this is Mephistopheles from the first movie, but he is inexplicably referred to as "Roarke." Although Johnny Blaze had embraced his Ghost Rider persona in the previous movie, he is now desperate to be rid of it. Equally unexplained is the fact that Johnny now becomes the Ghost Rider when he is angry. The only conceivable way to account for this is that the writers confused Ghost Rider with the Incredible Hulk, and no one ever realized the mistake. (Indeed, it would astonish me if the screenplay was ever read by anyone before production began.)

I hate this movie.

Here, just watch this scene. This may make you laugh. It makes me weep. That's because I have seen the movie, and I can report that everything else in it is even worse.

I realize that my over-the-top condemnation of Spirit of Vengeance may make some foolish reader decide to see it, on the theory of "How bad could it really be?" and/or "If it's this awful, I've got to see it." I assure you, you will regret it. (Remember who's saying this, now—how terrible does a movie have to be before I hate it?)

I refuse to include a graphic labeling this movie as over- or underrated. It is beneath contempt. Let us never speak of it again.

Angels in the Endzone

Gary Nadeau, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 28%

This is a made-for-TV sequel to Angels in the Outfield, and I think the simplest way to summarize this movie's plot is to point out the ways it differs from its forerunner:

1. Angels in the Outfield was about a baseball team called the Angels. Angels in the Endzone is about a football team called the Angels.

2. Angels in the Outfield was about professional athletes. This is about high school athletes.

3. Angels in the Outfield revolved around a kid who had been abandoned by his father. Angels in the Endzone is about two kids whose father is dead.

4. Angels in the Outfield was good.

Beyond that, you can just import all of your knowledge of the plot of the previous movie into the entry for this one. But if you'd like a little bit more information, read on.

Jesse (Matthew Lawrence) and Kevin (the kid from Richie Rich's Christmas Wish) are two brothers who have a perfect relationship with their father. He loves them, he teaches them to play football, and in general he spends copious amounts of Time with His Children. In fact, their relationship is so perfect, that the only conceivable conclusion is that this character is going to die in the first act.

And so he does, sending Jesse into a deep depression. He quits the (jaw-droppingly incompetent) high school football team before their first game, he becomes distant from his family, and he ditches class to hang out with the bad kids. These lowlifes make their living betting against the home team, taking advantage of the school-spirited freshmen who are naive enough to think the Angels have a prayer of winning.

About three quarters of the way through the movie, they graduate from book-making to robbing a gas station. They've dragged Jesse along for the ride, and for a few minutes we're led to believe he's been implicated in the crime, but no—his mom and the police immediately accept his (true) version of events, and nothing comes of it. I mention this not because it's interesting, but because it's a good example of the amount of thought that seems to have gone into the story.

As for the other brother, Kevin, his role is limited entirely to replicating Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character from the first movie. Jesse tells the boy that their family will never be okay until the day the Westfield Angels win the state championship. This, of course, parallels a similar line delivered by the deadbeat dad in Outfield. In that movie, young JoGo misunderstood his dad's sarcasm and prayed for the Angels to win the Pennant, but here, it's not really clear what Kevin thinks. I don't think he really believes that his family's well-being is connected to the football championship, but he prays for the team to win. It's almost as if he's aware that what he's doing is required by the plot.

Just like in the first movie, the real angels take to the field to perform obviously impossible feats, but no one in the stands is the wiser. (At one point, the football flies literally the entire length of the field under its own power, and no one seems to question how this is possible.) Somehow the divine manipulation of sporting events seems even more inappropriate when it's a bunch of teenagers the angels are cheating against. Then there is the obligatory subplot about how the adults think Kevin is hallucinating (including an appalling scene where a school counselor puts the moves on Kevin's widowed mother).

All the while, Jesse refuses to rejoin his team, because football brings up painful memories of his father. Finally, the coach has a heart-to-heart with Jesse and reminds him that his father was proud of his talent and would want him to continue playing The Game of Football. So Jesse agrees to play the championship game, which he wins without the help of the angels.

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I guess this is all right for a made-for-TV movie. The guy who plays the coach gives a workmanlike performance, and the mom isn't bad. There is also an assistant coach who seems to be channeling Harold from the Red Green Show; I could have done without him. The main brothers are fine.

One other thing: For a movie about divine beings, Angels in the Outfield didn't really have much religious content. This one seems to have more of a Calvinist attitude. There's a scene where Jesse blames himself for his father's accident, and his mother—rather than just reminding Jesse that he wasn't responsible—insists that nothing could have prevented his death. It's a pretty jarringly fatalistic comment, and the movie just leaves it at that. Maybe the kid from Seventh Heaven had a subconscious effect on the writers.

Ernest Rides Again

John Cherry, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 14%

It was difficult to find a poster for this movie. Most of the images I found were too small to be usable, so I resorted to this strange confetti-themed option. This seems to have been the theatrical poster, and it mentions the short subject "Mr. Bill Goes to Washington," which was screened together with Ernest Rides Again and also appeared on the VHS.

The other images were all DVD covers, and most of them included a blurb from the Boston Globe declaring this "The best of the series." Now, I don't think I'm out of line if I consider myself an authority on Ernest, and I can't imagine anyone thinking this was the best Ernest movie. This was the first one produced without the backing of Disney, and it certainly shows. Even the poster is half-assed—just look at the stock close-up of Ernest they used. He never even wears that white thermal Henley shirt in the movie (or in any other movie, for that matter). And I don't recall any confetti being involved in the plot.

Speaking of the plot, we now find Ernest working as custodian at a Virginia college, where he amuses himself by pretending to be Indiana Jones and palling around with a history professor named Dr. Melon. Melon likes Ernest, but he is put off by Ernest's monumental childishness. Melon's colleagues think the good doctor is a crank, obsessed with a half-baked theory that the real Crown Jewels of England are hidden in a Revolutionary War cannon called Goliath.

Now get ready for this, because this is going to stun you: The theory is true, and the cannon is located near the college. And they find it. The rest of the movie is largely taken up by a series of chase sequences, as Ernest and Dr. Melon try to protect the cannon and the jewels from a sinister looter named Glencliff. This mostly involves the cannon rolling down the highway at high speed, but somehow making all the turns and staying safely on the road. Unbeknownst to our heroes, MI-6 has also taken an interest, and some secret agents join the chase.

Dr. Melon has surmised based on various historical sources that the Crown Jewels are in the barrel of the cannon, but Ernest eventually discovers them in a powder barrel beside the cannon. He places the crown on his head, whereupon Glencliff captures him. The crown is stuck so tightly to Ernest's head that Glencliff tries to remove it with a cranial saw; unfortunately, the saw fails to make a scratch on Ernest's skull. ("Good thing it hit the hard end," Ernest explains.)

The secret agents close in and save Ernest, but since the crown cannot be removed from his head, they declare that he must now serve as King of England. Ernest doesn't care for the idea ("I'd have to learn the language!"), and luckily the crown slips off during a "what's that on your shirt" prank.

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As I indicated above, this is far from the best in the series. In fact, it was the last to be released theatrically; beginning with Ernest Goes to School, the rest would be released direct to VHS, which, frankly, was for the best. I remember renting these things from Blockbuster on weekends in elementary school and watching them repeatedly. Clearly, that's what they were made for, and there was no sense releasing them to an unappreciative public full of fuddy-duddy adults.

This was also Linda Kasch's first of three appearances in an Ernest movie, this time as Dr. Melon's overbearing wife Nan. She is accompanied in most of her scenes by two ineffectual door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen who have the irritating habit of finishing each other's sentences. These roles cry out to be played by Gailard Sartain and Bill Byrge from the Disney installments, but alas, that comedy duo would never return.

But there's one other thing this movie has, and that's the best song in the world, the Ballad of Ernest P. Worrell: listen for yourself.