Innerspace (1987)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Meg Ryan, Kevin McCarthy

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I might have been compelled to include this in the reviews much earlier, as it was playing during the marathon of movies where I got to meet Dante*. As it came fresh off the now infamous summer of 2023 blackout, I opted to go home before it started to sleep in an air conditioned bed for the first time in over a week. Alas.

Did I Like It: There are movies Joe Dante directs where he is allowed (or maybe he stole?) free reign to do whatever he wanted, then there are those movies where he is hired to do a job, and inevitably does a yeoman’s job. Oddly enough, this one falls somewhere in the middle, which has a certain refreshing quality to it. At it’s core, it’s not much more than a slightly modernized riff on Fantastic Voyage (1966), which is interesting enough. The script justifies itself by forging together an odd couple out of all-American Quaid (how has he never played Jonathan Kent, when his son has already played Superman?) and comic goofball Short. Their chemistry fuel the movie almost entirely, made all the more impressive that the two stars barely share a few minutes of screen time physically, shifting the pitch on this film from an Odd Couple meets Fantastic Voyage to a high-concept comedy version of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Throw in some Looney Tunes-fueled high energy sequences, and you’ve got perhaps not Dante’s greatest film, but certainly one worth a watch all the same.

*I told him that Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) and Matinee (1993) were two of my favorite films. He politely thanked me, but there was an undercurrent to the thanks that—perhaps appropriately so—wished I had seen more movies. Alas.

Small Soldiers (1998)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Gregory Smith, Jay Mohr, Phil Hartman

Have I Seen it Before: Ahem. So, here’s the thing. I’m about a month away from what I hope to be a peak movie experience. Circle Cinema will be running Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). This would be enough to get me there with bells on. That it will be projected in 35mm is enough to make it worth a trek of many miles, to say nothing of going across town. That film alone gains more than perhaps any other by being projected on film, as the film infamously breaks by design. What’s more? Joe Dante himself will be there in person. June of 2023 will be a peak month of movies for me.

I’m stalling. You’re wanting to know if I’ve ever seen Small Soldiers. I did go see it in the fall of ‘98 at a second run theater, and the friends I went with got bored pretty quickly. To be fair, I wasn’t exactly not bored by the whole thing. They wanted to leave. I thought the movie would get better, but bowed to peer pressure and went with them.

So, yes. It’s with supreme shame I admit that the one film I’ve ever walked out of in the theater was one directed by Joe Dante. Is it possible to feel guilty about not thinking much of a movie several decades later.

Did I Like It: I’m comforted by the realization, after a little bit of further reading, that Dante never felt particularly thrilled with the film, as he was initially hired on to make a Dante film, with subversive and demented being the guiding words. Then, the studio decided that this had the potential (or market research) to be a big summer movie for kids, and the whole thing got smoothed out.

That’s why it will never be among the great Dante films. But that doesn’t make it uniquely unfortunate. As long as Dante kept making big studio films after Matinee (1993), or probably after Gremlins 2, those studios tried to reign him in. That’s okay. You can only get away with absolute heists of movies so many times before the powers that be get wise.

But he still manages to fit in some singularly Danteian things. The fundamental construction of the piece is a little subversive, with the monstrous creatures the heroes and the soldiers being (without much modification) the villains. References to movies like Bride of Frankenstein (1935) abound to let us big kids know that the man is still trying to show us all as good a time as possible.

The Howling (1981)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan, Christopher Stone

Have I Seen it Before: Never… Which ought to be somewhat surprising*.

Did I Like It: Joe Dante is a filmmaker who, for my money, has made an entire library of work while having one hand tied behind his back. There may not be a better forging of filmmaker and material than when Dante made Looney Toons: Back in Action (2002), but the film only managed to be a mildly pleasant diversion. I’ve never quite loved Small Soldiers (1998), even though some people swear by it and on paper I can see the appeal, but not everyone can make a hit every time at bat. Even Spielberg had 1941 (1979). Even Gremlins (1984) is only a glimpse of the unleashed demented genius which was finally given the keys to the studio for Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). Matinee (1993) is pretty great and also disproves the theory a bit. I’ll exchange words with anyone who says otherwise.

So, too, does this movie almost feel like a work of subversive genius, but only in those moments when the money behind a film aren’t paying attention. The film swings somewhat between being a serial killer cat-and-mouse thriller, an body snatcher-style invasion story, a marital drama, and ultimately in its final act the werewolf story advertised. By the time the heroine (Wallace) attempts to take control of the situation, and warn—at great self-sacrifice—the world of what is to come, the world reacts pretty much like the audience of a horror movie might, by shrugging and going on about their lives as if not much of any consequence has happened. It’s a pretty great ending for a movie, and the rest of the film—minus a set of cell-animated werewolves copulating—works against the Joe Dante curse and reaches for that brilliance Hollywood seems to want to stop him from accomplishing.

*To say nothing of the fact that this will be my first film back on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods. Life’s funny sometimes, and there’s always room to move forward and return to what worked in the past.

Gremlins (1984)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Dick Miller

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, certainly.

Did I Like It: There are two types of Gremlins fans. The Danteians, and the Columbites. The first group will show up for the series* for the chaos of it all. They might be part Gremlins themselves, if we dared to map their genome. They may like this film, but they love Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). The Columbites view the original film as a grim exercise in suburban horror. They live for the Santa-in-the-chimney monologue. They think this film is better if Mr. and Mrs. Futterman (Miller and Jackie Joseph) died at the end of Mr. Futterman’s plow. They think the second film is silly.

Only one group is right, and you’re not going to need two guesses to find out into which camp I fall.

Sure, the rules governing the balance between Mogwai and Gremlin make no sense, and we’ll have to wait for a whole additional movie before that absurdity is embraced, but it’s not entirely this film’s fault that its sequel completely eats its lunch I can never look upon Kingston Falls and not be taken completely out of the film. It’s Hill Valley, and they’re absolutely shooting on the Universal backlot, but this film actually precedes Back to the Future (1985).

The creature effects here age poorly, but we know they do get better. That’s just six years worth of progress working against this film. If you think that I’m just being needlessly negative about the film, I think Warner Bros. tends to agree with me. Almost every promotional image of Gizmo for this film is actually an image of him from the sequel.

But even if this film is written by Chris Columbus and can’t help but reflect his ethos, Joe Dante can’t help but author some portions of the film. The villains’ collective decision to cease their reign of terror in favor of a late night screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) is peak chaotic energy, and fundamentally makes the film a comedy, regardless of what Mr. Columbus may have typed all those years ago. Then there’s, my favorite scene when Mr. Pelzer (Axton) is calling home from the inventor’s convention. Robby the Robot (from Forbidden Planet (1956) is there. The Time Machine (from George Pal’s The Time Machine (1969) is there (and then it isn’t). It’s just a little bit of chaos leaking into the film. IS it enough to raise it above the sequel in my estimation? No, but it is an appetizer to the feast that is soon to follow.

*By the way, HBOMax, while we’re on the subject… I was promised an animated Gremlins series in 2021. Joe Dante himself was consulting with it. What happened there? The internet seems to think that it will now come some time in 2022… I guess we’ll see.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, John Glover, Tony Randall

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, my yes.

Did I Like It: It is without a doubt one of my top five movies of all time. It is a strong contender for my favorite movie of all time. If you’re about to say to me that the original Gremlins (1984) is better, I don’t want to hear it.

There may be films in existence that are more deliberately created works of art. There may be stories that are crafted with more precision. But there is absolutely not one film in the century-plus existence of the format that is more in line—nay, likely created—my particular aesthetic, than Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

I love every inch of this film. I could run down the elements that light my imagination on fire, right down to something I only noticed during this screening: the guys in hazmat suits shoveling Gremlins remains into barrels. I want to know what happened to those barrels. I would go through all of those little touches, but you should really stop reading this website right now and watch the movie, regardless of whether or not you’ve never seen it before, seen it long ago, or watch it at least once every couple of years like I do.

One moment that floors me every time I see it, though, before I move on to some final thoughts. The day after Billy (Galligan) is arrested at Clamp Tower and his fiancé (Cates) bails him out, we cut to a police station. A normal film would have just given us that moment of exposition to get the two heroes back into the tower. This film spends several seconds dwelling on what appear to be a group of mime criminals being escorted from a paddy wagon. These mime have not been a part of the story up until this moment. They are not of any consequence to the rest of the story, and indeed, are never heard (or, I suppose, seen) from again. This is Joe Dante and the Gremlins aesthetic. Never let a moment go by that couldn’t be filled with a gag.

I love this movie, and you should, too.

Gremlins fandom tends to fall into two different camps, those who prefer the original, and those who know the sequel is the completely bonkers, objectively superior movie. I will immediately and irrevocably like a person less if they trash on this movie. In most cases when someone dislikes a movie I enjoy, I can rationalize that reasonable people can have different tastes. In this case, if someone does not like this movie, they are proclaiming their dislike for something so deep in my marrow, that we’ll never be the same again.

Matinee (1993)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz

Have I Seen it Before: Many long years ago, it was one of those movies that I absolutely wanted to go to see, and indulgent parents allowed for it, as Goodman was a pleasing weekly presence on TV at the time… and… um, that’s still true, as it turns out.

Did I Like It: Absolutely. It’s a perfect tragedy that both Charlie Haas doesn’t get to write major motion pictures anymore, and that Joe Dante isn’t directing like he was in the 80s and 90s.

While not as manic as the other film that assembled this director/producer/screenwriting team—Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)—it is still a sweet movie that plays to my own tastes beautifully. Loving movies, even/especially the bad ones, and the places where they are played, all while the world is coming apart at the seams. 

It’s a special thing when a filmmaker can go to work, and as the viewer I can get the sense that we’d get along pretty well, with are tastes being so perfectly aligned.

There’s one scene that’s about as good as anything else gets. Goodman describing the magic of a theater. And yet, the film never forgets to have a fun time. Both films-within-films are delightful running gags, but The Shook-Up Shopping Cart—the less prominent of the two side-productions is a blissfully absurdist gag amid an otherwise mainstream film.

One wonders if they could have leaned into that more, as the film was ultimately doomed to be a drag on poor Universal’s resources. Naturally, no one knew that at the time, and there really isn’t any reason that the film shouldn’t have been one of the big moneymakers of the year.

Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

Director: John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, George Miller

Cast: Vic Morrow (RIP), John Lithgow, Scatman Crothers, Dan Aykroyd

Have I Seen it Before: I think it’s probably safe to say that I’ve 

Did I Like It: You get four chances to like it, and I would say I get the job done about half the time.

The text of this review appeared previously in a blog post entitled “Do You Want to See Something *Really* Morbid? Why the Ends Almost Never Justify the Means” published on 07/02/17.

I’m a big fan of The Twilight Zone. I’m such a big fan of the show that I’ve been known to suggest fisticuffs whenever the honor of Rod Serling is impugned*. “To Serve Man,” “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, “Time Enough at Last”. These are truly great episodes of television.

And yet, efforts to re-capture the magic of the original TV show have often floundered. Sure Zone inspired a pinball machine that is the absolute pinnacle of that art form, but both attempts to bring the television series back—in 1985 and 2002—are less than memorable. Maybe the advent of color removed all magic from the concept**.

When the movie powerhouse of Steven Spielberg and John Landis attempted to make an anthology film based on the series, the reaction to the film was equally tepid. 

In some cases obliquely, and in others much more directly, Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) offers remakes of four classic episodes of the TV series to varying degrees of effectiveness, and for that matter, sheer horror. 

The strongest segment among them is the last: a manic, claustrophobic redux of the Richard Matheson classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” with John Lithgow as a naturally neurotic replacement for William Shatner. The gremlin on the wing of the plane in this version is far less laughable than the demented Lamb Chop of the original episode, and is more a terrifying, self-aware wraith ready to set up a homestead in your nightmares.

Moving backwards both in chronology and quality, Kathleen Quinlan stars in a re-constructed “It’s a Good Life”, the tale of a young boy with nigh-omnipotent powers and the destruction he leaves in his wake. Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace) brings his penchant for cartoonish malevolence to bear here, but it is an aptitude that doesn’t come to full fruition until Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). The ending Dante and company choose for the tale—wherein the kindly school teacher (Quinlan) tries to temper the god-boy’s misanthropy—falls short of the ending that appears in the original episode and skews a little too close to the happy-happy Spielbergian ideal so prevalent in the 80s.

Which makes sense, given that Spielberg’s own entry for the film is such a concentrated package of pathos that it almost warrants a dosage of Humalog packaged with every DVD. Scatman Crothers gives a group of residents at an old folks home the opportunity to reclaim their childhood, quite literally. It’s precious. And that’s all fine. Spielberg’s gonna Spielberg, especially pre-The Color Purple (1985), but you should at least be prepared.

And then there’s director John Landis’ (Animal House, The Blues Brothers) opening entry in the movie. It’s the least conceptually sound of all four stories. One imagines that this is because it has the least to do with one of the original TV episodes. Bill Connor (Vic Morrow) is an unrepentant racist and basket case who finds himself tumbling through time. With each Quantum Leap like jump, he finds himself as a different oppressed minority. At the end, he watches his friends shrug through his disappearance as he is taken away to a concentration camp in Nazi-era Europe.

It’s kind of a muddled mess, although it does have the virtue of having the classic hopeless-turn-as-moral ending that made the TV series famous. There is a reason both for its messiness and its bleak ending. It’s more horrifying than any moment in the finished film, I assure you. 

I made reference to the incident in <last week’s blog>, but in the early hours of July 23, 1982, on the final night of filming for the segment, an accident occurred that took the lives of three actors.

Accounts vary, but these are the generally accepted facts. The final shooting involved a massive sequence that would find Morrow’s character saving two Vietnamese children from a village under attack by American helicopters, after which he would be redeemed and return to his life reformed after only a half-hour or so of trauma. 

With a helicopter hovering nearby and explosions igniting all around them, Morrow crawls out into a small lake with a child in each arm. One of the pyrotechnic explosions caused the rear rotor on the helicopter to fail. The craft spun out of control and crashed into the nearby lake. The pilot and other crew members on board the chopper survived with minor injuries. On the ground, the helicopter decapitated Morrow and one of the child actors, 7-year-old Myca Dinh Le, and crushed the other child actor, 6-year-old Renee Shin-yi Chen. Rolling cameras from at least three different angles caught the whole sequence of events. The internet has archived this footage for all time, because of course it has. Several industrious online editors have even managed to enhance the footage frame-by-frame, because of course they have. I don’t recommend seeking out the footage for yourself. Just… Trust me.

Under “normal” circumstances, this would be a horrifying tragedy, but it gets worse from there. Some insist that Landis—in complete disregard of any semblance of safety—tried to order the lethal helicopter to an altitude even lower than the already dangerous 25 feet it maintained above the ground. Landis denies this, and instead points to the error of a special effects technician and a mis-timed explosion as the sole causes for the accident. The producers and director further disregarded safety and labor laws in a number of other ways. Child actors weren’t supposed to work in such close proximity to that degree of pyrotechnics; the filmmakers did anyway. Child actors weren’t supposed to work at such a late hour; the filmmakers paid their parents under the table. Landis copped to this much but, again, insists to this day that those factors had nothing to do with the actual accident.

NTSB inquiries labeled the event an accident, although they significantly changed their rules regulating helicopters on film sets. Civil cases took several years to settle with the families, while Landis and four other crew members were placed on trial for manslaughter. Amid some degree of controversy in the pre-OJ world, the five were acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing.

Even if I accept Landis’ side of the story and that every moment of the incident was beyond any reasonable control, I can’t imagine having blood on my hands for one of my own silly projects, regardless of how it turned out. Maybe it’s a shocking, potentially overwhelming story, but whenever I think about the Twilight Zone movie and the accident that accompanied it, I try to find some object lesson in the events. Maybe it’s that being creative is great, but being a human being is probably far more important.

*Don’t believe me? I issued just such a challenge on Friday. Twice. I will defend Mr. Serling’s honor, so help me Krom.

**To be fair, I think conversion away from black and white not only diminished attempts at remaking the Zone, but television, film, photography, and the entirety of human civilization. I’m willing to admit I might be alone there.