Director: Fred Dekker
Cast: André Gower, Robby Kiger, Duncan Regehr, Stephen Macht
Have I Seen It Before?: Never. Where have I been hiding this whole time?
Did I like it?: Maybe not as much as I hoped I would, but it’s still packed with plenty of charm.
The film is surprising in a few ways starting out. First, who knew the guy who directed RoboCop 3 (1993) was capable of making anything even remotely watchable. The second is that while this film shamelessly trucks in the same milieu as The Goonies (1985), but manages to have characters who actually want something and something resembling a story.
One might blanche a little bit at the sour nature of the kids who we are supposed to root for, but as we are theoretically closer to the end of the era of South Park, if these children aren’t the sweet kids hoisted on us by Spielberg, that’s all right. Plenty of other 80s films don’t reach for any sort of enlightenment with their characters. Come to think of it, if the kids were a little nicer to each other, they would feel less real. I don’t remember other kids being nice when I was younger.
I know it’s going to sound like I’m the guy who walks out of Hamilton saying that it was pretty good, except for all the rapping, but maybe the kids were the weakest part? I would have loved a movie that featured the classic Universal monster lineup* making their way through the world of the 1980s. Who really cares about Colin Clive or Edward Van Sloan during the classic movies? Why make the film focus on them?
*For that matter, had the film been produced by Univerasal, we might have gotten the monsters in their more ubiquitous form, instead of something vaguely akin to those images.