BEFORE: I'm back from North Carolina - after watching "Bad Moms", we drove down to check on one of the "Good Moms", namely mine, and well, she wasn't in a good place. She was 84 and she had dementia, so it felt like there was less of her hanging around each time we visited. She passed away while we were down there, so I guess it was a good thing that I got to see her one last time, a couple days after Mother's Day. But when my sister called - not texted, called - me late at the hotel on Wednesday night, I knew right away the reason for the call. As mentioned, she was one of the great moms of all time, and I'm not just saying that.
She was so good at doing the mom thing that many of our friends considered her their surrogate mom, or they just wished my mom was their mom, perhaps because of some issue with their mom. I mean, everybody's got issues, my mom was a bit too religious for my taste, but she was generous as hell. She was
always looking forward to the next holiday, or wedding or
anniversary or class reunion or church picnic. That’s what I’ll
remember, going with her to Chowderfest or having German food together
at the Schulverein or supervising Thanksgiving dinner prep.
A music teacher and piano virtuoso, sight-reading and transposing came easy to her. She tried to turn me into a musician but I had crazier dreams of my own. But I’m pretty solid on classical music trivia, that could come in handy one day. I’ll miss
arguing about religion with her, like we didn’t believe all the same
things but now for once I hope I’m wrong. She kept saying last month that
she needed to get home to her mother’s house in time for supper, and I
hope somehow that’s where she is now. She was the packer of
lunch-boxes, froster of birthday cakes, inventor of “blackout
spaghetti”. Feeder of
birds and squirrels, rescuer of stray cats and a few stray people, too.
Mila Kunis carries over from "Bad Moms". What this all means is that I'm going to shut down the blog again, we're just in NYC for a couple of days, then we re-pack for Massachusetts. So there will be only two films this week, and the birthdays are telling me that the next film needs to be on Wednesday, which is fine because I haven't planned the route to Father's Day, so I can't move past film 5,328 yet anyway.
THE PLOT: This time, the adults have shrunk themselves, and the kids need to fix it.
AFTER: This might seem like a weird choice, because Mila Kunis only has a small role here, as one of the niece's friends who comes over for the "party" once the kids think their parents have all gone off on two separate trips and left them alone - when really, the parents have been shrunk down to tiny size. The kids really should have known better, all four parents are way too responsible to leave them alone like that. But, you know, they misheard ONE phone message and spotted the $40 in pizza money on the board, so their minds went to the illogical conclusion that the two moms went on their 3-day spa trip and the two dads went to see the Space Shuttle landing. Really, the kids just could not WAIT to party and go wild and make a chili volcano that heated up the hot dog people.
The truth is, this film has been on my list for maybe longer than ANY other film - I believe this film was on my watchlist when I started doing this in 2009. Sure, I'll get around to this one, how hard could it possibly be to link to this? Really, I'm not sure because I don't think there even WAS a Disney Plus when I started this process, but this film ended up there, as the second sequel to "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids". I have that film and "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" on in-house made DVD, and over the years as my linking got better, I came to learn that crossing off the final film was darn near impossible. Rick Moranis basically retired from Hollywood, and he's coming back this year in "Spaceballs 2", plus he's going to be in a few documentaries on my Doc Block list, so now it feels like the time is right, I guess.
Well, after all that, like a 15-year or 17-year wait to watch this movie, I sure wish it had been a better film. Like, it's fine, it's not that stupid, just very silly, and not really well thought out, it's like they wanted to turn the first film on its head and shrink the adults this time, like, yeah, OK, whatever, but really it's the same idea, right? It's just harder because the people who KNOW how to work the machine suddenly can't work the machine, because they're tiny. Remember, this was WAY before "Ant-Man" and using pills or Pym particles or whatever, like there's a machine that makes you small, I guess it just removes like every other atom from your body, and then does that again, and again until you're like half an inch tall. Where does all that matter GO? Because physicists have told us you can't destroy matter, you can only convert it into energy, OK, great, well if that's true then you should be able to assemble this pile of ashes into the plank of wood it used to be, right? No takers? Maybe the machine just takes all the excess water out of your body, humans are like 95% water, right? But again, where does the water GO, and aren't those tiny people going to be thirsty?
(I remember watching the first "Batman" movie when I was a kid, the one made in the 1960's, and the villains kidnapped the members of the U.N. Security Council by zapping them with a ray gun that took all the water out of their bodies and left them as little piles of powder - when, really, if you had a gun that would take all the water out of someone they would look like a dessicated skeleton, but I digress. Then at some point all the powder vials got mixed together or something and Batman and Robin had to separate out all these little colored grains of powder, before re-hydrating the U.N. Security Council members by adding precise amounts of water, which is just absurd. Turning people into powders and back, just by removing or adding water? This is not how the human body works! Anyway, they couldn't really do it 100% correctly anyway, so the British council member was speaking Japanese, and the Japanese one was speaking German, and so even if the world worked like that, which it doesn't, it just wouldn't fail like that.)
I think this film is a bit like that, of course something, nearly everything has to go very wrong for four adults to be shrunken down to bug size, but still things couldn't go TOO too badly, because the film's only 75 minutes long, so things can only go SO wrong before they've got to start going right and the parents can be un-small-ified. I wish there could have been some kind of metaphor here, really any kind, like the kids are turning into pre-teens and that means they will need their parents less and less, the parents will be smaller in significance - nope, that's not suggested here, not at all. Or the kids think they don't need their parents to look out for them, only they really do, and then the parents re-appear just when they're needed, because the parents never stop looking out for their kids' welfare, even when they are "small" or far away. Nope, not even a hint of a metaphor here, the parents just get tiny and have to make their way from the lab in the attic to downstairs, and the parents can only watch helplessly as the kids turn the lack of parents into a sleepover and then a mixed-gender party where boys (uh-oh) from school show up and put the moves on the girls. I mean, such is life, really but the girls here are 14 or 15, they really shouldn't be left alone with horny boys. Their younger brothers try to come to their defense, but are effectively useless, one even has a potassium deficiency that kicks in at the worst possible time and renders him nearly comatose. Oh, if only his mother had left his medicine right on the counter where he was most likely to see it!
I'm surprised they still screen this film on Disney Plus, like it's full of Disney Channel actors (which is both an assessment of their career history AND acting ability) but front and center is Allison Mack, who invites the boys over to flirt with them, but in real life after appearing in "Smallville" she went on to join a cult where women were coerced into sleeping with the cult leader and with other senior members. Gee, you don't suppose being in THIS film somehow led to that, do you? There's also no explanation why Wayne's wife Diane looks different from how she did in the previous two films, or why young Adam has no memory of being turned into a giant-sized baby that attacked a major city back when he was two years old. For that matter, how is Wayne in business with his brother, who was never even mentioned in the previous two films?
I guess don't think too much about it, because clearly the screenwriter didn't. Somebody was more concerned with pointing out that roaches are evil but Daddy Longlegs spiders are somehow good, even if nobody can remember exactly how. What's really much more important is that Wayne needs to understand that if his son wants to go to baseball camp instead of science camp, that should be OK. Understanding each other's differences is very important, and so is learning to trust your kids when you leave them alone. But also, don't leave them alone, make sure that both parents aren't doing events on the same day - or if they are, one parent has to bring the kids along, don't just leave them $40 for pizza money because they'll just blow it on party supplies or a volcano full of chili.
Even the gag with the Tiki Man doesn't really go anywhere, and that was the genesis of needing to use the shrinking machine in the first place. The Tiki statue is too damn big, therefore it needs to be shrunk to one inch tall, just so Wayne can put one over on his wife? Why can't it just be reduced to like a foot tall and then it can be put in the backyard, like who cares? And why is the ultimate answer at the end of the film to make it five stories tall? That doesn't logically follow or solve the initial problem with it, which is that it was too damn big.
The only real use of metaphor here was when the shrunken parents fell down the laundry chute, and then the kid brought the laundry up to his room, and they were exasperated to find themselves right back where they started. Yeah, I think all of the viewers out there know that feeling, all too well. This was the first Disney live-action film to go direct to video, without a theatrical release - which means that everybody at Disney knew it would bomb in theaters.
Directed by Dean Cundey (cinematographer on "Jack and Jill" and "The Fog" (1980))
Also starring Rick Moranis (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Eve Gordon (last seen in "Irresistible"), Bug Hall, Robin Bartlett (last seen in "The Fablemans"), Stuart Pankin (last seen in "The Artist"), Allison Mack (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies"), Jake Richardson (last seen in "Clerks III"), Jojo Adams, Bryson Aust, Theodore Borders, Carlease Burke (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Laura Dunn, Robert Harvey (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Erica Lutrell (last seen in "Moonlight and Valentino"), Ashleigh Sterling, Lisa Wilhoit,
RATING: 3 out of 10 banana slices
