Director: Stewart Raffill
Cast: Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward, Katrina Caspary, Jade Calegory
Have I Seen It Before: If it weren’t for Paul Rudd and to a lesser extent an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 from the show’s Netflix era, the movie may have disappeared from our collective consciousness altogether, and would have done so with good reason. Had the film not just happened to have my name, I wouldn’t have rented it at least half a dozen times in the late 80s and early 90s.
Did I Like It: All of this is for good reason.
I’m reminded of two, wildly unrelated things as I watch this movie as an adult. The first is a plot line in Bryan Fuller’s superlative Hannibal. Will Graham (Dancy) is stuck on a case. Lecter (Mad Mikkelsen) can see what Graham is missing, and what’s more, knows Graham needs only the slighted push to get to the same conclusion. What does the good doctor do? He kills somebody else in just such a way that Graham sees the connection he had been missing, and needed to see a copycat done (intentionally) wrong to see it.
I am also reminded of that adage Roger Ebert would dust off with some frequency, which was attributed to Jean-Luc Godard, and I’ll paraphrase here: the best way to offer criticism of a film, is to make another film.
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) is a great film. A large amount of the population who encountered it on the small screen may not be able to fully appreciate it until they see it in a theater. No one, and I mean no one, is able to appreciate the full genius of Spielberg until they have to watch the material done wrong in almost every conceivable way.
Mac, as a puppet, is uniformly ugly to watch*. The child performances are terrible, although they didn’t have much of a script or idea for a film to work with. Calegory does his best, and might have faired better if he wandered into a Spielberg** film, but any thoughtfulness afforded being born with spina bifida is effectively surrendered when they throw the poor kid off a cliff. The whole thing is the unholy love child of a McDonalds commercial and the aforementioned E.T., ultimately yielding a Coca-Cola commercial.
Objectively, it is to be avoided, but if you’re interested in renewing your love affair with E.T., you couldn’t possibly beat the comparison.
*The soon to record episode of Say Something Nice will be replete with sentence like that which are meant to make me feel bad about myself.
**Heck, even a Fred Dekker film would have been an improvement.