Child’s Play (1988)

Director: Tom Holland

Cast: Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif

Have I Seen It Before: I’m certain that at some point I’ve sat down and watched this movie from beginning to end, but is it possible I’ve actually caught fifteen minutes here and there on cable screenings over the last thirty years? Yes, absolutely.

The film’s poster is the real memorable thing, isn’t it, though? No, I’m not talking about the one featured in this review, which positively screams to me that someone at the studio was more than a little ashamed about what was really at the heart of the terror of this film. I’m talking about the one that was plastered in every video store in the late 80s that jettisoned anything resembling shame, single-handedly torpedoed the My Buddy toy line, and led this video renter to eventually write a short story where the covers of horror videos come to life to get the drop on some unsuspecting kid who would be far less frightened if he actually got to watch the movies involved.

Did I Life It: From all that, you might be forgiven if you thought I didn’t like it. Surely, there are rough edges all around. The puppet is clearly a puppet, except when he’s at a distance and clearly a little person dressed as a puppet. The mythology is ridiculous (and indeed is a the vehicle of many a film of self-deprecation to come). The kid (Vincent) is only believable or effective when he appears to be in real danger (which is impressive enough).

But maybe it was a byproduct of my mood (which should always try to be surpassed in criticism), but far more likely it is as a result of the runtime, which kept the film from wearing out its welcome, but I suddenly found myself searching for Child’s Play 2 (1990) and on available via streaming. If that doesn’t count as some sort of endorsement for a horror movie, I don’t know what does.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Director: Leonard Nimoy

Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForrest Kelley, Catherine Hicks

Have I Seen it Before: Honestly? I really think this was the first piece of Star Trek I ever watched. For any number of years, my only copy of the film was on VHS recorded off the broadcast of the film on March 28th, 1993. I know this because the movie was interrupted every few minutes with an add for the 65th Academy Awards the next night. Not the best way to watch a movie repeatedly, but there it is.

Did I Like It: It’s an even numbered movie, right? It’s written—at least partially—by Nicholas Meyer, right?

As I mentioned before, this was—to my memory—the first piece of Star Trek I had ever taken in. As anyone who knows me can attest, that moment proved seminal to me, and as such it can’t be denied that The Voyage Home is perhaps the perfect gateway piece of Star Trek ever constructed. The Wrath of Khan (1982) may be the superior film, and some of the J.J. Abrams movies may possess a more self-assured modern blockbuster feel, but this is the one that is a straight ahead crowd-pleasing comedy.

And every inch of the film is devoted to that effect. Large portions of the screenplay were cannibalized from material that didn’t make it into Meyer’s fish-out-of-water Time After Time (1979). The score—by Leonard Rosenman—is a jaunty skip through San Francisco of the 1980s. It’s exactly the right score for this kind of movie, and I say this while maintaining that Rosenman’s score for Robocop 2 (1990) is perhaps the most incorrect score ever attached to a particular movie. Even the ingenue role played by Catherine Hicks was originally written for Eddie Murphy, although one imagines there was a fair amount of re-writing to make the transfer the roles between the two performers.

It’s also a comedy that likely wouldn’t work under any other circumstances. Nimoy and the writers had an intimate understanding of—if not Trek lore—the beating heart of what made Trek continue to work. The jokes spring out of the chemistry between the characters, and I challenge anyone to find another comedy film wherein the characters have twenty years of interplay to inform their reactions. I’ll wait here in the park for your answer. See? That hypothetical film just doesn’t exist.