gvg@hpcvlx.HP.COM (Greg Goebel) (07/06/89)
HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS
A film review by Greg Goebel
Copyright 1989 Greg Goebel
I spent the entire Spring waiting for the blockbuster Summer, but after
the first month of it I feel like I've been blockbustered once (or twice) too
many. INDIANA JONES! (A crisp production of more of the same of what never
did a lot for me in the first place.) STAR TREK V! (Aren't you folks getting
a little old for this sort of thing?) GHOSTBUSTERS II! (An amiable curtain
call.) BATMAN! (Like DUNE: somewhere in this darkness there is a great movie,
trying to escape but lost and confused.)
I feel like Morris the cat: Hollywood dishes out its treasures to please
me and I stifle a yawn -- ungrateful, jaded, and spoiled wretch that I am. (I
couldn't even have the satisfaction of reviewing these movies, since everyone
is going to see them anyway and all I would accomplish by writing reviews is to
enmesh myself in time-consuming arguments.)
But maybe I'm not so jaded after all. Maybe way down deep I still am that
little kid, holding his mother's hand as he walks into a movie house (in the
days when theatres had only one screen and almost always ran double features)
to watch an absent-minded professor floating through the moonlit sky in a Model
T that went faintly "glub, glub, glub." Why do I think this? Because of
Disney's latest effort: HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS.
Absent-minded professor Wayne Stylinski (Rick Moranis) is working in his
attic on a device to shrink things down to microscopic size. Unfortunately,
his single-minded attention to his work is causing family strains: his wife
spent the night at her mother's, and his two kids -- pretty teen-aged Amy and
her genius kid brother Nick -- are a little worried.
Stylinski's next door neighbor, Big Russ Thompson -- who is still coasting
on his past glories as the supreme jock in his high school class -- thinks
Stylinski is pretty strange, but he has other worries: Why is his lackluster
teenage son, little Russ, so indifferent to football and fishing and all the
other measures of true manhood? (Brings back memories.) After all, his
younger son, Ron, is keen on sports! Why, just watch Ron go into the back yard
with a bat and ball to knock around a little ... though his aim is a little
lousy, since the ball goes through the Stylinski's attic window ... where it
activates the unattended shrinking machine ... which sweeps back and forth and
waits, patiently, menacingly, for someone to walk through the door....
Okay, you know what happens next. And since you do, the question comes
up: why bother to see this film?
BECAUSE IT'S A LOT OF FUN!
Yes, it's a familiar recipe, but even the oldest recipe is tasty if
prepared with the proper attention to the fine details. The script is neat,
and so is the acting (thank God, for once Rick Moranis is not playing a moping
super-nerd), the action moves along nicely, the extensive special effects range
from acceptable to downright impressive ... and even the Stylinski's
obligatory cute little dog, Corky, is adept in his role.
Most pleasant is how this film takes an old Disney format and brings it up
to date with little awkwardness. Spielberg stole the Disney format and
populated it with gimmicks and widgets; in HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS Disney
steals that infatuation with gadgets in turn and manages to use it with more
wit and cleverness than Spielberg can normally manage. The parents are modern
parents -- I couldn't imagine watching a mom in Walt's lifetime realizing that
her pretty teenage girl is lost along with a flakey teenage boy and muttering
in apprehension: "They *better* behave themselves!"
There are so many other deft touches; subtle jokes like the endless stream
of junk Big Russ loads into his RV as he's preparing to take his family to
"rough it," or the strange way that whatever happens to little Nick, his big
four-eyes glasses make it without a scratch. One of the fine delights is the
soundtrack, which has that precise timing and calculation of the soundtracks to
the best Warner Brothers cartoons (and which in fact steals its main theme from
those soundtracks). Even the opening credits are a pleasure, framed by a
little cartoon that draws deeply from the best animation of the Fifties.
Given all this praise, you might think I'm saying that this film is the
greatest thing in entertainment since the Walkman, but that would be going way
too far. This is a little, corny, fairy-cake movie, not far removed from a
Disney Sunday Movie, based on an old format, built on a familiar premise; what
makes it work is that almost everything in it is done *right* -- and that fact
is the greatest pleasure in the entire thing. Take the kids; if you're a big
kid -- go yourself.
Oh, almost forgot -- HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS is preceded by a new Maroon
Cartoon: Roger Rabbit, Baby Herman, and Veronica in "Tummy Trouble." They *do*
make them like they used to -- thank God!
[<>] gvgleeper@mtgzx.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) (08/07/89)
HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Some beautiful sets and some quality
stop-motion animation make this film more of a pleasure than
it had a right to be. When it tells an adventure story, it
is quite good. When it tries to be goofball, it tries too
hard. Rating: high +1.
Of course, one of the staples of the fantasy film has always been
monsters. Big creatures lumbering around have a certain fascination. And
one variant on the monster concept is to shrink the main character so it is
the whole world that is monstrous. DEVIL DOLL was probably not the first
film about shrinking humans, but it is the earliest so well-known. For the
most part, it did not show us the world from the small human's point of
view. It was, however, followed by more notable films which used the horror
of being small: DR. CYCLOPS, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, ATTACK OF THE
PUPPET PEOPLE, the television show "World of Giants" (not to be confused
with "Land of the Giants," which was more in the Gulliver tradition than
really being about shrunken people), FANTASTIC VOYAGE (which introduced
micro-miniaturization), THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN, INNERSPACE, and this
year's entry, HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS.
Like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN and INNERSPACE, HONEY is basically
a comedy, though perhaps better because it was not so ambitious. Rick
Moranis plays Wayne Szalinski, who works in a research lab in his attic for
a major corporation. He is working on making a laser beam squeeze most of
the space out of atoms so that matter shrinks down. Through carelessness
and accident the beam is accidentally turned on his two children and the two
children of his neighbor Russ Thompson (played by Matt Frewer, formerly Max
Headroom). They are swept up with the trash and put down on the far end of
the backyard. From there the story proceeds on two levels: what is
happening in the parents' world and the adventures of the four victims as
they try to return home. Director Joe Johnston's story is much better told
and ironically is even more believable when it is about the miniaturization
victims. On one hand you have a slapstick goofball comedy of the parents
looking for their children; on the other, you have a nice little adventure
film of four people trying to survive and make their way through the grass
jungle of a backyard.
What is particularly nice about the film is the detail of the giant
backyard. The scale is roughly 1:240 and by gosh, everything seems very
accurate to that scale. Stop-motion insects were animated by a team
including David Allen, a disciple of Ray Harryhausen, and they look very
good. A great deal of attention to detail was used in the big sets. What
is needed to do the sets correctly is a great deal of craft labor, so
filming in Mexico City's Churubusco Studios were labor is plentiful was a
very intelligent decision. The sets are surprisingly moody and artistically
done. In some scenes the presence of water betrayed the actual size of the
sets, but generally this film's miniature world seemed as believable or more
so than in just about any other miniaturization film. As a result, HONEY, I
SHRUNK THE KIDS is much better than it seems it has a right to be. I would
give it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
I suppose something should be said about "Tummy Trouble," the Roger
Rabbit cartoon accompanying HONEY. The most common complaint I hear is that
it may well frighten children. Perhaps, and perhaps not. The simple fact is
that the cartoon is not very well constructed. One thing rarely noted about
a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but nonetheless true, is that it tells its story well.
Even if the story is just a rack on which to hang jokes, it should be a
well-constructed rack. "Tummy Trouble" is kind of a cheesy cartoon with a
lot of forced humor and a basic story that does not make a lot of sense.
Bugs had a well-defined, likeable character; Roger is basically just
obnoxious. Sure, people laughed at it, but it is a lower form of humor than
the classic Warner Brothers' cartoons, just as the Three Stooges were funny
but not of the quality of Laurel and Hardy.
Mark R. Leeper
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