Camp Nowhere

Camp Nowhere (1994) 

Dir. by Jonathan Prince

Starring Jonathan Jackson, Melody Kay, Andrew Keegan and Christopher Lloyd

[content warning: child endangerment]

Plot:

Tired of being sent to boring summer camps by their parents, three teenagers blackmail a former drama teacher into helping them convince their parents into sending them to a fake camp that he will “run,” while they use their parents’ money to have fun all summer.  Soon, half of the school is in on the con, and Camp Nowhere is born.  However, they have to scramble to pull off an even bigger con when the parents demand to have a day to visit – and each of them expects to see a different type of camp.

Nostalgia:

I saw this in theaters when it first came out.  I was 12 years old at the time, the perfect age for the movie.  I don’t remember if we had it on video or not.  I’m leaning towards not, because while I have a fair bit of recollection of it it’s not one of those movies that I remember chapter and verse.

Review:

The year before this movie came out, I crossed over from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts.  That gave me my first opportunity to attend a Boy Scout summer camp.  I’d been to day camps before, and a couple of weekend long camping trips, but this was the first time that I spent an entire week away from my parents.   It was a rocky first experience (there was some staff-on-camper bullying involved), but it was the start of a long string of regular summer camping for me that lasted until I went away to college.

I think that’s why this movie resonated so much with me at the time.  I was really into Scouts and camping for a long time, and quite a few of my favorite kid-oriented comedies from this time period (Heavyweights, Bushwhacked, etc.) involved camping in some way.  None of these movies did particularly well at the box office, and have mostly been forgotten, but I was pretty much the exact target audience for them.

Of course, looking back at them as an adult, it’s clear to me exactly why they didn’t succeed with audiences or critics.  For most of its run time, Camp Nowhere is pretty much just scene after scene of teenagers goofing off. There’s also some mildly uncomfortable cringe humor thrown in as the main character Mud and the teacher (played by Christopher Lloyd in full Christopher Lloyd mode) attempt to con various authority figures into believing that there’s nothing going on at the camp.  I’ll admit that scenes like the dinner sequence, where Mud and Lloyd are improvising a fake father-son relationship while Lloyd has a dinner date with the doctor that treated Mud’s injured arm earlier in the film, are mildly triggering to me now, and I had to mute that particular scene until it was over.  One too many bad experiences being put on the spot by teachers in high school, I guess.

And, of course, there’s the matter of the reckless endangerment of children.  The aforementioned injured arm occurred due to an accident involving unsupervised use of fireworks.  The kids are walking around with chainsaws, riding dune buggies, and doing who knows what else with all of the money that their parents paid to send them to camp.  This was all super fun to see when I was a kid myself, of course, but now I’ve been through multiple Youth Protection training classes as an adult Scout leader, and live in a house with two young children.  I don’t really find much of the antics in the movie funny anymore.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I totally hated this rewatch.  There was actually at least one extended sequence that I did enjoy quite a lot: the Parent’s Day con at the end.  It was what I remembered most about the movie before I watched it, and is where the movie stops being a series of episodic happenings and actually comes together into something with a definitive plot.  The parents variously believe that their children are attending weight loss, computer, drama or military camps, and the kids have to quick-change the camp into each version as the parents arrive and leave, leaving little room for error or the entire game is up.  It’s a very Home Alone-esque series of Rube Goldberg gags to transform the camp each time, and I wish more of the movie had gone this way.

Alas, it did not, and despite enjoying the final 15 minutes or so I can’t really recommend the movie.  I really liked the movie when I was younger, but now I find myself much more on the side of the parents than the kids.  Maybe not to the point of sending my nieces to “Camp Microchip,” but I’ve seen medical billing now, and know just how much putting your eye out with a BB gun actually costs.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C-

Stray Thoughts: 

-One of the parents is played by Kate Mulgrew, something that I had absolutely no recollection of (and probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway, considering I didn’t watch any Star Trek at all until I was in college)

-This is supposedly Jessica Alba’s first screen role, but even knowing that going in I failed to notice her at all throughout the movie.

Stargate

Stargate (1994)
Dir. by Roland Emmerich

Starring Kurt Russell, James Spader and Jaye Davidson

[content warning: Orientalism, transphobia, white savior narratives, depression, suicide, child death]

Plot:

Egyptologist and conspiracy-theorist Daniel Jackson is hired by the government to translate a series of hieroglyphs on a stone unearthed in Giza in the 20s.  When he succeeds, he learns that they are the code to activate a portal to the other side of the universe.  Traveling with a team of soldiers to investigate the destination planet, Jackson becomes entangled in a revolution by the humans living on that planet against their alien overlords, who have taken the guises of the Egyptian deities.

Nostalgia:

I’m almost positive that I saw this movie in the theaters.  I don’t actually remember having done so, but it’s exactly the sort of movie I would have gone to see. If it wasn’t in the theaters, I certainly saw it on Pay-Per-View the next year.  We taped it off of TV, and the Extended Cut DVD is one of the first I can remember buying when I was in college and got my first DVD player.  I had several friends who were obsessed with the TV show at the time, but I never really watched it while it was airing.  Saw the first couple of seasons on DVD about a decade ago now, and that’s about it.

Review:

How the hell did this movie start a franchise that’s lasted for 25 years?  There’s been three TV shows, two direct-to-DVD movies, and a web series, all stemming from this action B-movie from the guys who brought you Geostorm and The Day After Tomorrow.  What did this movie had that so many other mid-90s movies didn’t?

I think what it had going for it, more than anything else, was its setting and design.  This movie came out in 1994, at a time when CG was beginning to take over the film world.  Sci-fi movies were big, and there hadn’t been a big, traditional fantasy movie since NeverEnding Story II in 1990, four years earlier.  While this isn’t, strictly speaking, a fantasy movie, the ancient Egyptian trappings give it much more of a time-traveling fantasy feel than most of the other sci-fi movies of the time.  It was something different and unexpected. 

It also helps that the movie has two strong leads.  An almost unrecognizably young James Spader, of The Blacklist fame, plays Daniel Jackson as a nerdy scientist who’s incredibly competent in his field, but is completely out of his depth in most other situations.  As a very nerdy kid myself, who’d later be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, I saw a lot of myself in Jackson, and immediately emphasized with him.  Despite his social awkwardness, Spader manages to imbue Jackson with some of the quirky humor that he would later bring to Alan Shore on Boston Legal. In one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, Jackson, in an attempt to communicate to the planet’s citizens that the disgusting-looking food they’ve given him tastes like chicken, flaps his arms up and down and makes clucking noises repeatedly.  Everyone – slave and Earth soldier alike – just stares at him.  It’s equal parts endearing and cringe-inducing, but goes a long way to making Jackson an actual person instead of a character defined by his job or role in the film.

The same can be said for Kurt Russell as Col. O’Neil.  The role could have just been played as a hard-ass military commander, and that’s what he seems to be for the first couple of scenes.  However, he’s introduced in a depressive state, with his son having recently died in an accidental shooting.  As the movies goes on, Russell brings in not only the sadness that one might expect with such a background, but also the anger.  His Russell is bitter and self-destructive, but not in a way that he’s willing to take down the rest of his men with him.  While I enjoyed Richard Dean Anderson in the role in what I saw of the TV series, I think that his portrayal is barely the same character as what we see in the movie, rounding off all of the sharp edges of his personality and making him a more lighthearted individual.  It works for the show, but I don’t think it would have for the movie.

Now, the setting does bring up legitimate concerns about Orientalism. The movie essentially revolves around the (already existing at the time) conspiracy theory that all of the great works of ancient Egypt were completed with alien assistance.  Because, of course, a culture from that part of the world wouldn’t have been able to do it on their own.  No, the pyramids were just landing docks for alien spacecraft, and all of Egyptian culture is based on lies and manipulation.  And it takes the arrival of the strong, Western military power to free the backwards, tribal slaves from their oppressors *eyeroll* (though, in the movie’s defense, they were deliberately kept in that state by the aliens.  The script wisely incorporates two millennia of linguistic drift and doesn’t have them speaking an existing dialect, and you could posit that there would have been a corresponding 2000-year tech increase if not for alien intervention).

So yeah, the cultural politics of Stargate aren’t great.  Also complicating matters is the casting of Jaye Davidson as the villain Ra. He had just come off of his debut performance as a transgender woman in the movie The Crying Game, a performance for which he’d received a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  His role here is obviously playing up that association, deliberately going for a very young, androgynous look for the utterly evil alien.  That this movie came out the same year as Ace Ventura, a movie also inspired by The Crying Game for its negative portrayal of a transgender woman, makes me convinced that the filmmakers were going for the same thing.  It seems to have actually been enough to get Jaye Davidson to quit acting altogether after this movie.

  

Fortunately for the franchise, from what I remember the TV show’s more complicated mythology manages to help alleviate this problem somewhat, though there are definitely individual episodes that are still cringe-worthy in an early TNG way (I’m looking at you, “Emancipation”).  I’m not sure I could recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, especially if you’re sensitive to Orientalism or white savior narratives. I still enjoyed the movie, however, despite its more obvious flaws, though that enjoyment has drifted more into the “guilty pleasure” status over the years. 

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-One thing I definitely can’t fault the movie for is its score. I really like David Arnold’s music, especially the main title theme, which they’d use for the TV series as well.

-My roommate in college was from Colorado Springs, which is where the real complex that the Stargate team is fictionally located in resides.  He always got great amusement from the fact that in real-life there’s a zoo sitting on top of the mountain the Stargate’s inside of.

Demolition Man

Demolition Man (1993)
Dir. by Marco Brambilla

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock and Nigel Hawthorne

[content warning: political satire, actual murder]

Plot:

When LAPD Sergeant John “the Demolition Man” Spartan is framed for the murder of civilians while taking down crime kingpin Simon Phoenix, both he and Phoenix become some of the first inmates in the new cryogenic prison being tested.  Thirty years later, Phoenix escapes during a parole hearing, and begins to terrorize a future Los Angeles that is no longer used to violence of any kind.  The police, now only experienced in apprehending suspects who break curfew and tell dirty jokes, thaw Spartan out of cryo and reinstate him in an attempt to recapture the dangerous fugitive.

Nostalgia:

My first memories of this movie are actually of the aggressive marketing push for the movie conducted by Taco Bell, due to its prominent feature in the film.  I was only 11 at the time, and there was no way my parents were actually going to let me watch the movie itself.  I think I first saw it sometime in high school, and by the time I headed off to college it was one of my favorite action movies.  I don’t watch it quite as much anymore, but I still give it a spin in the DVD player every year or so.

Review:

This is a very bizarre film.  It’s one-half violent 90s sci-fi action movie, and one-half social satire dystopian comedy.  While the two halves don’t really fit all that well together on paper, I enjoy both of them equally, and the movie itself quite a bit.

While the movie isn’t a deliberate comedy (at least, no one in the movie is playing it like a comedy), the borderline-surreal environment that the reawakened Spartan finds himself in is more than sufficient for the film to have plenty of laughs to go with its action.  Most of these come from Spartan’s interplay with his new partner on the force, Sandra Bullock’s extremely enthusiastic Lenina Huxley.  A 20^th-century pop culture fanatic, she gloms on to Spartan like her own private Stan Lee, eager to show off her (frequently wrong) knowledge of 90s slang and action hero tropes. There’s also a lot of fish-out-of-water humor involving Spartan’s reactions to “modern” technology, most notably an extended reoccurring gag with a machine that dispenses fines for swearing, and the lack of toilet paper in the restrooms – two gags that naturally dovetail together in one of the movie’s more memorable scenes.

While Bullock and Stallone are both good in their roles, special attention has to be paid to Wesley Snipes as the villain.  When we first meet him, he’s a ruthless, self-assured drug kingpin, who takes pleasure in taunting Spartan before he gets captured.  Due to the machinations of the outwardly affable Dr. Cocteau, he emerges from cryo freeze as an over-the-top, almost cartoonish terrorist.  While Stallone mostly goes around with this bemused, “I can’t believe this shit” expression, Snipes’s Simon Phoenix is openly disdainful and sarcastic about the future, making his interactions with just about every part of this ridiculous dystopia a joy to watch.  It’s not quite to the level of Alan Rickman in Robin Hood, but he does begin to approach that level of scenery-chewing, which is just perfect for a movie with this satirical tone.

Phoenix's wardrobe is sponsored by Goodyear

Speaking of the dystopia, the movie takes multiple potshots at PC culture and over-regulation.  Pretty much everything that makes life enjoyable seems to have been regulated out of existence, leading to a famous, epic libertarian Denis Leary rant late in the film.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the movie went into production shortly after Bill Clinton took office.  However, even if the movie’s politics aren’t really modern any more, it has several points that still resonate today, especially when it comes to the government trying to decide what people can do with their bodies (both sex and pregnancy without a permit having been made illegal).  And the Taco Bell scene is still amazing.

I’m not sure what it says about the movie that what it’s probably most known for now is an extended product placement.  According to Huxley, all of the major franchises competed themselves into oblivion, leaving Taco Bell as the only restaurant in existence.  As a reward for saving his life, Dr. Cocteau invites Spartan to an upscale, fancy Taco Bell, with a valet and live music.  It’s such a memorable scene that Taco Bell actually recreated the restaurant from the movie as a pop-up at this year’s San Diego Comic Con to celebrate the movie’s 25^th anniversary.

I haven’t talked much about the action itself in the movie, and that’s because the action movie side of the film is mostly standard early-90s fair.  It’s well shot, for the most part, and decently choreographed, but there’s nothing truly inventive about any of it.  This movie doesn’t live on its violence, as much as it does the reactions of everyone else to the fights, from Huxley’s gleeful enthusiasm to a random cop who has to use a Youtube tutorial to figure out how to arrest Phoenix.

Even if I don’t really agree with all of the movie’s satirical targets, I find that there’s more than enough for me to still enjoy it, even in 2018.  It’s definitely a relic of its time, but that’s actually part of the point: Spartan is an 80s/90s era action hero in a modern world that’s moved beyond him.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-Seriously, I’ve seen multiple breakdowns and infographics trying to explain how the three seashells thing is supposed to work.  And I get it in theory.  My question is, what does the next person to come into the restroom do? Use the same seashells?

-Jack Black has a blink-and-you-miss-him role as one of the Scraps in the sewers, something I never caught in all of my times watching it until I had it pointed out to me.

-This movie accurately called Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career, a decade before he became Governor of California.  In fact, the movie has him becoming president due to a new Constitutional amendment being passed – an amendment which was actually proposed right after Schwarzenegger was elected.

-In a slightly creepier coincidence, the inmate immediately before Simon Phoenix on the parole hearing docket is listed as a “Peterson, Scott.” Many years after the movie’s release, a man named Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife, in a media circus trial that made the news nightly.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Robert Picardo and John Glover

[content warning: potential transphobia, sexual assault]

Plot:

Several years, after the original Gremlins movie, Gizmo the Mogwai’s elderly caretaker dies and his shop is bulldozed to make way for a fancy commercial center. Taken to Clamp Tower in Manhattan by a research scientist, he is freed by his friend Daniel Peltzer, who is now working as an artist in the building. When an accident causes a new group of gremlins to be created, Daniel must try to convince his skeptical bosses that a horde of chaotic creatures is about to descend upon the highly automated “smart building.”

Nostalgia:

This is yet another of my family’s seemingly endless collection of movies taped off of basic cable during the early 90s. We only had this one, not the original, so I never ended up seeing it until much after this one, and was positively shocked at its very different tone. I do really like the original, and appreciate its status as a classic horror-comedy, but if pressed I’d have to say that I actually enjoy this one more.

Review:

This…is a very weird movie. Now, I’ve watched some weird movies for this blog so far. I’ve seen giant worms with tentacle tongues, 3000-year-old Chinese sorcerers, suburban serial killers and kung fu disco dancing street thugs. But this might be the most deliberately strange movie I’ve seen in a long time. And I still kind of love it for that.

The original Gremlins was a horror/comedy which expertly balanced both sides of the equation, and still has some genuinely frightening scenes. This movie, on the other hand, seems almost intended as a rickroll of the audiences who went into it expecting something like the first film (and in fact, it kinda was. More on that later). About 45 minutes into the movie, it takes an abrupt left turn and abandons all pretenses at being a horror film. Instead, it becomes, essentially, a live action cartoon, getting more and more ridiculous and over-the-top with every passing minute. While in the original the gremlins were actually quite dangerous, and were a threat to the lives of everyone in the town, here they instead seem to be displaced residents of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Toontown. If left to their own devices, they’d cause just as much havoc against each other as they would against any of the humans. This feeling is reinforced by the opening of the film, where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck interrupt the credits to argue about who gets to sit on top of the 60th anniversary Warner Bros. logo. It sets the tone for the sheer wackiness that is about to ensue over the course of the film. 

Most of the chaos in the film can be laid at the feet of Christopher Lee’s character, a genetic researcher whose lab seems to be a subdivision of Acme Enterprises. Here, the gremlins go through a series of transformations that ups their variety a hundredfold over the first film, where there was little to differentiate the various individuals. Thanks to the lab’s experiments, we end up with gremlins that are bat-hybrids, part vegetable, made of electricity and, most memorably, one who is intelligent and erudite, like Marvel’s Beast, with the voice of Tony Randall. Even the new version of the original film’s villain, Spike, goes through a transformation, becoming what is essentially a D&D drider in the only real scary scene in the movie.

Once the movie passes the halfway point, many of the human characters disappear for long stretches of time, as the narrative stops to just allow the gremlins to run amok. Nowhere is this more evident than the famous fourth-wall breaking sequence. When originally projected in theaters (on film, of course – this was way before the era of digital projection), the movie suddenly stopped, as if the film had become jammed, and then tore visually on-screen. Before any audience member would have time to get up and complain, however, the shadows of two gremlins in the projection booth appeared, making increasingly elaborate shadow puppets in the light of the projector. The movie then moves to the lobby of the theater itself, where a parent is complaining to the manager about the film’s content. He sends an usher into the theater, who gets Hulk Hogan to stand up from the audience and intimidate the gremlins into restarting the movie. It’s up there with Ferris Bueller’s monologues for me in terms of fourth-wall-breaking stunts, and is the ultimate distillation of what Joe Dante was trying to do with the movie.

That being, of course, fucking with both the audience and studio’s expectations. He had initially been extremely resistant to the idea of doing a sequel to the original Gremlins, as he thought that it had a satisfying ending that didn’t justify a sequel. After trying and failing to get it up and running on their own, the studio went back to Dante and offered him triple the budget of the first film and complete creative control over the direction of the project. Still not wanting to make a sequel, but also not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, Dante instead decided to make a satire of the original movie, and of overblown Hollywood sequels in general. While I personally believe that he succeeded wildly, critics and audiences were much more split over the movie, and it ultimately lost money. 

This is an incredibly silly, over-the-top movie, even more so than I remember it being. However, it’s also a very refreshing departure from most Hollywood sequels, and I really enjoyed it.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-The movie was originally intended to have a much more villainous Ronald Clamp, which is why he’s portrayed as a combination of Ted Turner and Donald Trump. However, they found that John Glover’s performance was just so likeable that they rewrote the script to turn him into a more sympathetic character.

-When the movie was released on VHS, they replaced the fourth-wall breaking with a different scene involving the gremlins turning off the VCR and channel surfing until John Wayne scares them off. This was the version that I grew up watching, and I didn’t see the Hulk Hogan version until it was finally released on DVD. I now prefer the original, though.

-One of the transformations that I didn’t mention above is where one of the gremlins drinks a formula that makes them explicitly female, with long hair, pouty lips and noticeable breasts. While it’s never clear if the gremlins had any sexual dimorphism prior to this (they reproduce through parthenogenesis, after all), what is clear is that this trans gremlin seems to be uninterested in participating in any of the anarchy. She’s more interested in a romantic pursuit of Robert Picardo’s character, and becomes the only gremlin to survive the movie because of it. While the character is ultimately played for laughs, the laughs never come at the expense of the transition itself. Once she’s female, the movie just accepts that fact, and the humor seems to be more focused on Picardo’s character’s reactions to being romanced by a two-foot-tall lizard creature. While I don’t feel the need to knock the movie for trans representation in this instance, I do have to fault it for its use of sexual assault (specifically Gremlin-on-human) for humor. Yes, Picardo decides to go along with it in the end, but I detected a lot of overtones of Stockholm Syndrome involved.

-I now understand the gremlin repeating “Is it safe?” while he has Danny strapped to a dentist chair, a joke that always eluded me when I watched this in the 90s.

If Looks Could Kill

If Looks Could Kill (1991)
Dir. by William Dear

Starring Richard Grieco, Roger Rees and Gabrielle Anwar

[content warning: sexism, transphobia]

Plot:

Teenage slacker Michael Corbin is given a surprise on graduation day when his diploma is withheld due to an incomplete grade in French. In order to get the credit he needs to graduate, he has to accompany his French teacher on a summer trip to France. Unfortunately, he is mistaken at the airport for an American secret agent traveling under the same name, and is co-opted by MI6 into assisting with a dangerous mission. At first he goes along with it, enamored of the fast cars and spy gadgets, until he learns that being a spy might actually have real-life stakes.

Nostalgia:

I have literally zero memory of when I first saw this. I’m pretty sure it had to be a VHS rental, though we’d eventually own a copy ourselves. I grew up watching the James Bond movies, so a James Bond parody starring a teenager definitely appealed to teenage me. I actually wasn’t able to track down a DVD copy of the movie, so I eventually resorted to pulling out that old pan-and-scan VHS tape from a box in the basement and watched it on my parents’ VCR.

Review:

This film is basically White Cishet Power Trip Fantasy: The Movie. It starts with a premise that’s essentially someone’s fanfiction come to life: a teenager is mistaken for a secret agent and given access to all of the cool spy gadgets from the Bond films. And for about two thirds of the running time, Corbin behaves exactly how you’d expect a horny, straight Hollywood teenager to act in such a situation. He goofs around, acts like he knows what he’s doing, fails to take anything seriously, and survives mainly on sheer luck.

For example, Corbin engages in an action movie car chase without ever once realizing that he’s being pursued. He’s trying to lower the windshield so he can hit on the woman in a convertible driving next to him, and starts flipping switches randomly. These switches deploy the Bond car defenses, eventually blowing up the car that’s been chasing him – something he only notices once the explosion occurs. Even after that, he seems to be more upset that he blew out his tires and let the girl get away than at any property destruction or death he may have just caused. 

Now, this is a problem that I could most certainly ignore while watching the movie as a teenager. But looking back at it as an adult, I was pretty constantly annoyed by Corbin’s attitude about pretty much everything for over an hour of the movie. It’s only when the movie actually finally gets to the villain’s chateau, and he faces up to the seriousness of his situation, that I found myself enjoying the character at all. The movie stops trying to be a frat house comedy with spy trappings at this point, and actually turns into a decent Bond movie pastiche, complete with one-liners, great set piece fights, and gadget-induced escapes. Unfortunately, the movie is only 88 minutes long, so you have to wade through almost two thirds of the film before getting to any of the good stuff.

In addition to my problems with the Corbin character and the way he’s written, there’s also a whole lot of fairly crass sex humor. For example, there’s an extended joke about Corbin being seduced by the evil femme fatale agent (named Areola Canasta!), who’s attempting to kill him with a scorpion in bed. He doesn’t want to have sex without a condom, and spends what feels like five minutes trying to open a heavily-fortified tube of “Combat Condoms” in the bathroom. Meanwhile, the agent is stung by her own scorpion, and is writhing around on the bed moaning – sounds that Corbin mistakes for an orgasm. There’s also a fairly glaring transphobic joke involving a pair of X-ray glasses that I definitely don’t remember from the last time I watched this. 

Fortunately, the movie gets redeemed somewhat by its villains. Roger Rees, whom I mostly remember from playing the Sheriff in Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood parody, is much more serious here as Augustus Steranko, the Bond villain whose plan basically amounts to…creating the Euro. But he lends a much needed gravitas to the movie, as an antidote to Corbin’s attitude. And Linda Hunt is just delightful as the henchwoman who wears a gold whip around her neck like a choker, and really really likes killing people for Steranko. I also found myself enjoying Robin Barlett’s performance as the French teacher, whose main defining characteristics at the start of the movie are hating Corbin and having unfortunate taste in headwear. She gets mistaken for a Cold War mercenary by both MI6 and the CIA (really, neither organization comes off as competent in the least), and embraces the persona by the end of the film, packing an Uzi and wearing ripped clothing as a headband, Rambo-style.

So yeah, this was nowhere near as good as I remember it being. If only the rest of the movie had been like the final 20 minutes, I might have enjoyed the rewatch a lot more. It probably deserves to be as obscure and hard to find as it is now.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C

Stray Thoughts:

-The British agent who gets killed in the movie’s version of the Bond cold open is Roger Daltrey, lead singer for The Who. I guess he really needed the extra paycheck that year.

-Corbin is supposed to be from Detroit. I’m pretty sure that every student on that class trip to France was white (or at least, I don’t remember seeing any students of color). I’ve lived in the Detroit area for almost 30 years, and unless his school was in Grosse Pointe that casting is flat-out wrong.

-This movie’s so obscure now that I couldn’t even find any good screenshots to include.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
Dir. by Steve Barron

Starring Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas and Josh Pais

[content warning: Yellow Peril, sexism]

Plot:

While investigating a series of mysterious crimes, TV news reporter April O’Neil is saved from a mugging by the Ninja Turtles, a group of four anthropomorphic reptiles trained in ninjitsu by their rat master, Splinter. When Splinter is kidnapped by the forces of the Foot clan of ninjas, who are behind the crime wave, the Turtles take refuge with O’Neil. The five of them, plus masked vigilante Casey Jones, must locate the Foot’s secret hideout, rescue Splinter, and put an end to the criminal empire.

Nostalgia:

I was a huge fan of the animated Ninja Turtles series (and the arcade game – the less said about the original NES game, the better), so of course I saw this in theaters as soon as my parents would take me. It ended up being the last movie I saw in America before we moved to the U.K., about two weeks later. I had one of those storybooks with the cassette tape that came with it, and I would listen to it on repeat while going to bed for like the first six months we were in England.

Review:

If you didn’t grow up in the United States in the late 1980s, you might not realize what a huge deal the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were. The characters had been created as a parody of Frank Miller’s dark and gritty take on Daredevil in the mid-80s, but hadn’t really taken off until a syndicated Saturday morning cartoon debuted in 1987. It toned down a lot of the comic’s rough edges to be more kid-friendly, and was one of the biggest hits of its time, running for 10 seasons and almost 200 episodes. It also, of course, sold many an action figure, lunchbox, breakfast cereal and video game.

It was a foregone conclusion that they’d attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the franchise with a movie release. However, they made the odd (in retrospect) decisions to A) do a movie about anthropomorphic animals in live-action, in the pre-CG era, and B ) to make it an adaptation of the original comic books, ignoring most of what had made the cartoon so popular in the first place. In fact, the first of these proved to be so problematic that virtually no movie studio wanted to touch it with a ten-foot-pole, even with the guaranteed fanbase from the cartoon. Eventually, the Henson Company stepped in, with Jim Henson seeing it as a personal challenge to create something that would look good on-screen. He not only succeeded, but ended up creating the foundation upon which all future animatronic characters would be based. 

So we have a low-budget movie that ignored most of what made its content popular, with untested and experimental special effects, being released by an independent studio (New Line) that was known mostly for art house movies and cheap B-horror. Why, then, was it such a massive hit, and is still a beloved nostalgia film for so many people?

For me, I think it’s the very fact that it wasn’t the cartoon version of the Turtles. I don’t think the Turtles as portrayed on the show would have worked in live-action. The show is really silly, and very much operates on cartoon logic They kept some of the more distinctive elements of the show (Mikey’s immaturity, the colored headbands, “Cowabunga”) but otherwise tried to ground as much of the movie in reality as six-foot-tall turtles named after Renaissance artists would allow. No aliens, no mutating goons, no mad scientists, no Turtle battle wagons. Just a modern-day Fagin who takes in angry young men (I don’t think we see any female Foot members, though I may be wrong) and turns them into a personal army. Twenty-five years later and Shredder would have had a Youtube channel and a Twitter account.

Since when have five anthro animals been living in my apartment?
I need to clean more.

The fights in the movie are also very appropriate for the ages of both the protagonists and their Foot clan opponents, all of whom would be in their teens or early twenties. The movie begins with the Turtles’ first real mission, so they’re all still quite new at the hero thing and haven’t ever really been in a live fight with people who intend to hurt them before. And the Foot “ninjas” can’t have had more than a year or two of training themselves, given their age and the recency of the crime wave. It helps to make the awkward fighting of the Turtles (whose actors had limited movement and sight because of the costumes) more sensible, and also explains away a lot of the sillier bits of the fights (the dunking in a fish tank, the nunchuck contest, etc): they’re ALL immature and trying to show off. 

Now, one thing I don’t really buy as an adult is the relationship between April and Casey Jones. He’s kind of an asshole to her for most of the movie, breaking her firing to her in maybe the worst way possible, and running off a whole string of potential condescending and sexist nicknames for her, asking her to choose one. Sure, he saves her life, and helps her and the Turtles out when they’re hiding at her farm. But I can’t see how they go from screaming at each other and slamming doors (one of the Turtles even compares it to Moonlighting) to kissing by the end of the film.

There’s also a current of Yellow Peril inherent to a lot of the scenes involving Shredder and his second-in-command, Tatsu. They’re the only actual Japanese people in the movie (Splinter, despite being a Japanese rat, is voiced by, of all people, Kevin Clash), and neither have any redeeming features at all. Tatsu nearly beats one of his own students to death (and does kill him in the script) for letting the Turtles escape, and Shredder is literally covered in knives. April O’Neil even makes a fairly racist joke when first encountering the Foot ninjas, asking whether they were sent by Sony to collect on late TV payments. However, it’s not a huge focal point of the movie (both Shredder and Tatsu probably have a grand total of fifteen minutes of screen time between the two), and it definitely wasn’t a deal-breaker for me. But it’s certainly something I noticed a lot more now than I did back then. 

TMNT is definitely a flawed film. It doesn’t actually have that much to do with the franchise that people were expecting; the animatronics, though groundbreaking, definitely didn’t help the staging of the action at all; and there’s some dubious romance and racial aspects that distract from the whole. However, it’s probably the best movie possible given the budget and the state of Hollywood special effects at the time. It’s quite telling that Michael Bay-produced reboot, for all of the might of 2010s CG and blockbuster budget, couldn’t actually improve on the Turtles from 1990. I don’t know if the movie would hold any appeal at all for someone who didn’t grow up with it, but for those who did it’s a nice nostalgia bomb to revisit from time to time.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-The Foot clan member who shows the new recruit Danny around their very-late-80s hangout, with video games, skateboard ramps, and bootleg cigarettes, is none other than Sam Rockwell! I had absolutely no idea he was in this, but managed to recognize him immediately this time around.

-The joke about Casey Jones using a signed Jose Canseco baseball bat as a weapon plays a lot differently now than did back then, given his association with the steroids scandal.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
Dir. by Kevin Reynolds

Starring Kevin Costner, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman

[content warning: Crusades, religious persecution, witchcraft]

Plot:

Robin of Locksley, a Crusader imprisoned in Jerusalem, escapes with the help of the Moorish prisoner Azeem. Returning to England, he finds that the Sheriff of Nottingham has branded his father a devil-worshipper and seized his lands. Banding together with a group of forest outlaws, he and Azeem set out on a campaign to thwart the Sheriff’s attempt to stage a coup and overthrow King Richard.

Nostalgia:

When I was eight years old, my father was transferred from America to the U.K. for business. It was in the middle of the school year, so instead of immediately enrolling me in the British school system my parents held me out of school until the next school year began. We spent six months exploring Britain instead, including stops at Nottingham and the actual Sherwood Forest. That also happened to be the year that I read The Hobbit for the first time, and the two combined to firmly cement my love of fantasy literature for life. The next year, while we were still living north of London, this movie came out in theaters. It was the right movie at the right time. It might not be the best cinematic version of Robin Hood, but it’s definitely the one that I’ve seen the most times.

Review:

The cinematic history of Robin Hood is a long and peculiar tale. It seems that every 10-15 years there’s a new version of the story that comes along, with pretensions of being the “definitive” Robin Hood. Personally, I think that ship sailed back in the 1930s with the Errol Flynn version, as that movie helped define the look and feel of all subsequent Robin Hood retellings. However, each generation definitely puts its own spin on things, from the 1970s furry version to the 2010 Ridley Scott movie that kills off King Richard in the first ten minutes.

The 1991 Kevin Costner version was very distinctly a movie made for the tail-end of the 1980s action movie boom. It’s got explosions, horse chases, and the villain from Die Hard. Robin Hood even gets flung over the walls of a castle with a catapult! Kevin Costner seems to attempt an English accent for about twenty minutes, before just giving it up and playing it as an American. The movie was a ginormous financial success, becoming the second-highest grossing film that year at the world-wide box office, but a lot of critics had disdain for it. It got nominated for two Razzies, and it’s been fashionable to hate on the movie ever since, like a forest-bound Waterworld (which coincidentally had both the same lead actor and director as this).

I'm pretty sure 1100s-era black powder isn't going to do THAT

I personally think that the hate for this movie is extremely misplaced. I’m of the opinion that it’s the best cinematic Robin Hood movie made in the last forty-five years, and probably the best fantasy movie of the early 90s. And yes, I just called Prince of Thieves a fantasy. This version of the Sheriff has a fortune-telling, Satan-worshipping witch as an advisor, whose role is even more significant in the extended cut of the movie that I watched for this review. Her presence, and the fact that the England of Prince of Thieves resembles Westeros more than it does the actual 12th century England, puts the movie squarely in the fantasy camp for me.

A large portion (perhaps even the majority) of my love for this movie can be laid at the feet of two actors. The first is Alan Rickman as the Sheriff. This may be the most over-the-top villain performance ever committed to celluloid, and I unabashedly love every second that he’s in the frame. Rickman is clearly having the time of his life playing the villain, and this movie, coming so soon after Die Hard, is probably what earned him his reputation as one of the best villain performers of his generation. He steals the movie in the same way that Jack Nicholson’s Joker did to the first Batman movie, which is probably why the next major Robin Hood movie after this one downplayed the Sheriff role so much that you could be forgiven for not even noticing that the character was in the movie.

No scenery left unchewed

The other actor is Morgan Freeman, playing the new addition to the Merry Men, the Moor Azeem. This wasn’t the first Robin Hood adaptation to feature a Muslim character in the ensemble. The British TV show Robin of Sherwood featured a Saracen named Nasir a good five years earlier. But Freeman’s performance left so much of an impression that it’s hard to imagine a new Robin Hood production that doesn’t include the character, especially for American audiences that may not have been as familiar with the origins of the Robin Hood legend. While Jamie Foxx may be playing Little John in the new adaptation coming out later this year, his appearance is clearly modelled after Freeman’s in Prince of Thieves. 

I think it is especially significant that not only does Freeman play a black Muslim, two minority groups that until this point had been woefully underrepresented in Robin Hood films (and in the case of PoC, in fantasy films in general), but that he is also perhaps the most positively-portrayed member of the Merry Men. This is even more interesting in contrast to the movie’s take on Friar Tuck, and the interactions between the two men that make up a significant side plot in the movie. Tuck’s always been portrayed as a bit of a bon vivant: a great lover of food and drink, sort of a “boisterous bruiser” type. Prince of Thieves' Tuck, as portrayed by Michael McShane, goes a little bit farther than that, however. He is first introduced singing a ribald drinking song while he gorges himself on wine. When he meets Robin Hood, he latches on to Robin’s leg and begins to chew upon it, forcing the remaining men of Robin’s band to pry the inebriated cleric off him. He is rude, unshaven, and slovenly at all times, and is pretty much an altogether poor example of a clergyman.

Yet, his position as a member of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church gives him an air of moral superiority which colors his judgment. He cannot see the positive traits of Azeem, his humility and spirituality. He can only see that he is a Muslim, whom the Pope has declared to be the sworn enemies of Christianity. Tuck blindly assumes that a heathen that does not follow God in the same fashion as a Christian could not possess knowledge that a Christian does not, despite the fact that the Muslim civilization of the twelfth century was the most technologically advanced of the time. He cannot see past this us-versus-them mentality, saying that “You know nothing of our God”, even though, as Azeem points out, Muslims and Christians both worship the Jewish God. This is why Tuck initially refuses to allow Azeem to attempt to save the life of Little John’s wife. Azeem’s success in performing the surgery brings about a marked change in Tuck’s attitude towards the Moor. He is now humbled before his Muslim counterpart, stating “I may be Godly, but I know now that I am not worldly.” As a final gesture of contrition and reconciliation for his prior behavior, he offers to share his precious beer with Azeem. Of course, Azeem must decline, as he holds to the Muslim prescription against alcohol. However, the two men become friends from this point on, and even team up together for the infiltration of Nottingham at the end of the movie. 

Okay, is it obvious yet that I wrote about this movie for my Master’s thesis? Sure, the movie does some things wrong. Maybe a lot of things wrong (just ask anyone who’s at all familiar with the geography of Great Britain to explain how Hadrian’s Wall is within walking distance of Nottingham). But it also does a whole lot right, and really shouldn’t be written off as so many people seem to have done in the last couple of decades.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-In case anyone’s wondering, my thesis was about how Hollywood had portrayed Arabs and Muslims historically, and how that portrayal was affected by 9/11.

-Seriously, it’s not just any old wall that they’re walking along. They used Sycamore Gap, only probably the single most famous section of the Wall, and maybe the most-photographed single tree in the U.K.

-The music for this movie, by the late Michael Kamen, is truly amazing. It’s one of the best movie scores of the 90s in my opinion. And the Bryan Adams song, cheesy though it may be, is also my mother’s favorite song. So I can’t really complain about that either.

Maverick

Maverick (1994)
Dir. by Richard Donner

Starring Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Alfred Molina and James Garner

[content warning: Wild West tropes involving Native Americans, racial stereotyping, sexism and Mel Gibson]

Plot:

Bret Maverick, a professional gambler in the late 1800s, finds himself $3000 short of the entrance fee for an elite poker tournament with a $500,000 cash prize (about $12 million in today’s dollars). To obtain it, he engages in a series of comic misadventures, accompanied by a female con artist and an exasperated lawman.

Nostalgia:

Unlike a lot of Baby Boomer-aged American parents, my father was never particularly into Westerns while I was growing up. I never saw most of the classics of the genre, and had to seek them out on VHS and DVD when I was older. This was one of the few exceptions to that. I don’t recall seeing it in theaters, but it was one that we’d bring along on trips on VHS (we used to haul around a small tube TV in the minivan for road trips).

Review:

I was very interested to see how this particular one would hold up, as I haven’t seen it since before Mel Gibson’s infamous drunk driving arrest. It’s also a Wild West comedy from twenty years ago, which opens it up to all sorts of potential tropes that have not aged particularly well in the intervening decades. Fortunately, other than a couple of quibbles I found that I really didn’t have all that much to complain about.

It helps that the movie clearly doesn’t take itself all that seriously. The television show that it was based on had comedic overtones from the start, but here they wisely turned the movie remake into a full-blown comedy. A lot of clichéd Western tropes get repeatedly upended and subverted, from Maverick paying off a gang in advance to throw a fistfight to make him look better, to the Native American war band that speaks fluent English but makes a big threatening show (with Maverick’s help) just to troll his traveling companions. 

It was actually this last group that I was most worried about, as Westerns involving Native Americans have aged probably the worst out of all of them. It turns out that this might actually be the smartest part of the movie. Chief Joseph’s tribe is portrayed very positively, while avoiding a lot of the “noble savage” or “mystical Native American” tropes common at the time (see: Dances With Wolves). No, all of the war paint and drums are explicitly because they are being paid by a wealthy European to provide an “authentic” Western experience based on dime novels. Joseph is actually quite cynical about the whole thing, but is willing to take the Duke’s money anyway as it will benefit the tribe. He and Maverick eventually use the Duke’s desire for clichéd tropes against him to secure Maverick’s entrance fee, conning him into a fake “Injun hunt” so that he can fulfill his cowboy fantasies, and then blackmailing him with threatened jail time over the “murder.” It acknowledges the existence of these tropes, while simultaneously turning them back on those who would insist on them.

Now, as I said earlier, I did indeed have some problems. Most of them have to do with two characters: Jodie Foster’s Annabelle and Alfred Molina’s villain Angel. Or, rather, the way Maverick treats both of those characters. Through her actions, Annabelle is shown to be both an exceptional con artist and an expert gambler. She gets the better of Maverick on multiple occasions, is cool under pressure, and seems to be quite taken with him. Maverick, however, spends a good half of the movie mocking her skills and trolling her at every opportunity, and I couldn’t help but think of Mel Gibson’s off-screen behavior while watching it. He even asks her to clean his clothes for him, because “surely you must know how.” Likewise, the character of Angel, who is identified as a Spaniard in dialogue but is coded as Mexican throughout the movie, is introduced as smelling of “refried beans.” He is portrayed in the worst light of any of the characters in the movie – even more so than his boss, Commodore Duvall, the actual main villain of the movie.

Overall, I did end up enjoying the movie quite a bit on this rewatch, way more than I had been expecting to. I found it to be a generally entertaining comedy, with a lot of con artist movie elements thrown in for good measure. If you can stomach Mel Gibson (and I know there are some who can’t), it might be worth a spin or two.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-At least this movie manages to avoid any noticeable brownface. Chief Joseph is played by actual Canadian First Nations actor Graham Greene, and although Alfred Molina is British he is the son of a Spanish immigrant, which matches the character’s stated nationality from the movie.

-There are also a LOT of cameos in this movie. Most notably, Danny Glover robs the bank where Maverick is attempting to get a loan repaid to him. Gibson seems to recognize him, and the Lethal Weapon music plays as he leaves the bank.

-I remember the climactic poker tournament as being the finale of the movie, maybe the last 15 minutes or so. I was quite surprised to find that it actually starts just over halfway through, and takes up a good third of the film.

Tremors

Tremors (1990)

Dir. by Ron Underwood

Starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter and Michael Gross

Plot:

The residents of the isolated desert town of Perfection, Nevada, including two handymen, a geologist grad student, and a survivalist couple, come under attack by giant worm creatures that hunt them through vibrations in the ground.

Nostalgia:

I honestly can’t recall the first time I saw this.  It must have been on TV, as we didn’t have it on VHS until I was in high school (I taped it off of cable).  It’s just one of those movie’s that always been there in my life.  I know I watched it while I was in college, but I don’t think I’ve seen it since then.

Review:

I’ve never been a huge horror movie watcher.  I’ve always been interested in the genre, dating back to when I used to go into the video store as a kid (remember when they had those?) and look at all of the gloriously 80s box art in the section I wasn’t allowed to rent from.  But as for actually watching the movies, I’ve always seemed to prefer to read about them, and watch clips on Youtube, rather than actually sit through them in theaters.  The one big exception has always been monster movies.  From werewolves to Cthulhu, I’ve always enjoyed a good creature feature (except for zombies.  Never been a big zombie fan).

The Graboids in Tremors certainly weren’t the first monsters I ever encountered in movies.  There were a lot of monsters in the fantasy movies I grew up with, after all, from the two-headed dragon in Willow to the Ceti eels in Wrath of Khan (which gave me nightmares when I was eight).  But they were probably the most memorable one of my childhood, as they were really unlike anything else I’d ever seen before*.  Giant eyeless worm things with mouths full of tentacles, which had their own mouths – not something you encounter every day.  They were doubly impressive this time around as I realized that not only were they done entirely practically, but very frequently at full-size.  There’s just something about having an actual thirty foot long monster on-screen, a tactile presence that’s so often lacking in modern monster movies.

Now THAT's a monster

I also forgot just how much this movie is a horror comedy.  In my mind, it’s always been a horror film first and foremost, sharing the same headspace as things like Anaconda, where the humor was entirely unintentional.  Instead, it’s closer to something like Arachnophobia.  I guess the very fact that the monsters are given the name “Graboids” should have clued me in to the movie not taking itself too seriously.  Sure, a lot of people get eaten in this movie.  But it also has an endless stream of banter between the handymen Earl and Val, as well as one of the few actually enjoyable right-wing NRA enthusiasts that I can name off-hand. It’s not a coincidence that Michael Gross’s gun-toting Burt Gummer would become the star of the long-running direct-to-DVD sequel series, as he frequently manages to steal the movie from Kevin Bacon, which is no easy feat.

About the only situation where I can get behind one of these guys nowadays

Speaking of Kevin Bacon, this is probably the first encounter with the legendary Earth hero.  Either this, or The Air Up There, which I barely remember and probably won’t cover here because I’d just be yelling about cultural imperialism the whole review.  Anyway, he’s in fine form here, as a guy who’s already sick of his dead-end job in the middle of nowhere even before giant worms start eating the place.  In addition to the aforementioned Michael Gross, Reba McEntire is also actually a pleasant surprise as Burt’s wife and fellow survivalist, in what I believe was her first acting role.  She’s presented as being Burt’s equal, and the script allows her to give her husband gun advice and to open fire on the Graboids with double pistols, and never comments once on her gender. 

Bacon’s love interest, the geologist Rhonda, is also given a lot of agency.  She uses her scientific expertise to come up with a lot of the info that they use to evade and defeat the monsters, and she’s the one who comes up with the pole-vaulting technique to get them off the rock that they’re trapped on early in the film.  It’s just refreshing to see a monster movie in which none of the female characters are ever portrayed as damsels in distress, even when they are in distress.

Tremors wasn’t hugely successful at the box office despite good critical reviews, but it went on to be a huge cult classic on cable and home video, and spawned five direct-to-DVD sequels and a short-lived TV series, of varying quality.  As with many horror franchises, however, the original entry is still definitely the best one, and it held up for me just as much as it did when I was growing up.  I’m actually a little sad that I went almost fifteen years without seeing it, as it could easily slip into my regular DVD watching rotation.

Nostalgia: A-

Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

*Yes, I’m familiar with Dune’s sandworms, and Beetlejuice’s as well.  But I didn’t read Dune until college and still haven’t seen the movie, and Beetlejuice’s monsters were very cartoony stop motion animation, and really aren’t comparable at all to the Graboids.

-If “Graboids” wasn’t enough to clue you in that this is a horror comedy, the sequels have “Ass-Blasters.”  Just try saying that out loud with a straight face.

The Mighty Ducks

The Mighty Ducks (1992)

Dir. by Stephen Herek

Starring Emilio Estevez, Lane Smith and Joshua Jackson

Plot:

A successful but arrogant asshole Minneapolis attorney is sentenced to community service coaching youth hockey following a DUI arrest.  He is assigned to the worst team in the league, an underfunded squad without much in the way of talent or equipment.  Resistant at first, he starts to embrace the team when he begins a rivalry with his old coach from when he was a youth player himself, who still blames him for blowing the shot that would have won the championship.

Nostalgia:

I wasn’t big on professional sports movies growing up.  Rocky, Field of Dreams, Major League…couldn’t have cared less.  However, for some reason I watched a lot of youth sports movies, and this one was my favorite.  Maybe it was growing up in Detroit, a city that still bears the nickname “Hockeytown,” during the era of the Russian Five.  Whatever it was, I probably watched this several dozen times between the ages of 10 and 16.  It never made the jump to DVD in our house, though, so I haven’t seen it since I stopped watching VHS around 2004.

Review:

Sports movies, especially underdog ones, have a very definitive formula.  A new coach comes in, takes over a terrible team with untalented players, and suffers a few humiliating losses, before rallying the players around him and improbably winning the big game at the end.  If the movie’s a comedy, the players will often have bizarre and distinctive quirks to make them stand out, and which will usually factor into the team’s victory in some fashion.

The Mighty Ducks doesn’t really break that mold at all.  It’s almost a remake of The Bad News Bears with the sport changed, the only major difference being that unlike the Bears, the Ducks actually win the final championship game.  The movie still has the major theme of obsessive competitiveness being bad both for the kids and their coaches, though it does throw an extra narrative wrinkle into the mix by having the Ducks’ ultra-aggressive rival, the Hawks, be the childhood team of their new coach.  It does seem to be a little bit of stretch, however, to imply that most of Coach Bombay’s personal problems stem from a single blown shot twenty years ago.  Letting go of his old team and their win-at-all-cost attitude is Bombay’s main character arc, and while it’s a believable lesson to learn, hinging his entire character on a single experience was a bit much for me.

In fact, if you look a bit closer at the plot, the movie actually manages to undercut its own message.  At the beginning of the movie, Bombay is seen in court, using dirt that he’s dug up about the presiding judge to get an objection against him overruled.  It’s an underhanded tactic that leads to a victory, but gets him chewed out by both the prosecutor and his own boss.  Later on, he’s shown to be using the same dirty tactics with the hockey team, teaching them how to cheat by taking falls instead of actually learning how to play.  If the lesson Bombay is supposed to learn is that having fun and coming together as a team is more important than winning, you’d expect him to change his tactics over the course of the movie.  However, late in the film he informs the league that Hawks star player Adam Banks is living in an area that was redistricted, and is therefore ineligible to play for them.  He does this without first approaching the Hawks or Banks’s family, using it as a gotcha tactic right before a game.  This is exactly the same sort of dirty tactic that he was shown using earlier in the movie.  Sure, this time it’s done to correct an injustice rather than create one.  But try telling that to Banks.

Overall, I actually find that I don’t have a whole lot to say about the movie.  It’s a perfectly fine kids’ sports movie, with a nice performance from Emilio Estevez at the center.  But it’s not much more than that.

Nostalgia: B

Rewatch: C+

Stray Thoughts:

-This movie kicked off a whole mini industry of sports movies with kid protagonists.  Within two years you’d have Rookie of the Year, Little Big League, Little Giants and the Angels in the Outfield remake.  I’d include The Sandlot as well, but that movie is both a period piece and more a coming-of-age movie that just happens to involve baseball.

-Yes, this is the movie that inspired the original name of the Anaheim Ducks NHL franchise, which was added as an expansion team the year after the movie, and was originally owned by Disney.

-I grew up watching Lois & Clark on TV, so seeing the actor who played Perry White be so nasty here caused a fair bit of cognitive dissonance when I was young.

-I won’t be covering it, because I’ve only seen it once and have no nostalgia for it (and it’s not that good), but the third Mighty Ducks movie was actually filmed in part at my alma mater, Carleton College.