Another Saturday morning and another Top 10 from Luke Ryan over at TheVine. This one should make you think twice about firing up the old VHS. Although I own Spaceballs on DVD and will happily watch that shit all day!
Sometimes you find yourself sitting there of a weekend evening, idling about, when suddenly you get a rush of blood and decide that it’s time to revisit that cinematic gem from your primary school days, the charming film that brought such joy to 8-year old you. This is almost, without fail, a truly terrible idea. Turns out 8 year old you didn’t really have much of an eye for cinema. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that 8 year old you had the cinematic nous of… well, an 8 year old. Even worse, an 8 year old in the ’80s and early ’90s, a time when children’s cinema wasn’t necessarily at its creative apex. So, to save you the pain of having your childhood brutally shredded in front of your very eyes, here’s a list of films that under no circumstances should you consider rewatching as an adult, because they are… well, just a bit shit.
10. Gremlins
When I watched this movie as a little person I kinda overlooked exactly how sadistic it actually was. Like these green bastards really kill a lot of people. In quite extravagant ways. But even with my rose-tinted view of the movie, the image of the old woman being shot through a window after the Gremlins short-circuited her escalator chair has remained forever seared in my mind. Truth be told though, the film is actually quite funny in a tongue-in-cheek B-grade way, but I really wanted to include it just so that I could attach this clip, aptly titled “The Worst Christmas Story Ever”.
9. Labyrinth
I think my childhood self under-estimated to what extent Labyrinth was actually just a thinly veiled David Bowie music video. But then again, thanks to this movie, up until the age of 8 my childhood self was convinced that David Bowie was actually a woman. Sure the voice and massive codpiece didn’t fit the picture, but a man in tights? That’s just crazy. The pirate shirts also confused me. Meanwhile, what exactly was Bowie’s interest in Jennifer Connelly? Because by the end of the film I’m pretty sure he’s proposing marriage. And I’m pretty sure she’s supposed to be around 15. And I’m pretty sure he’s suggesting that they use her little brother as their surrogate goblin child. Which is fine and all, but sooner or later that kid is going to start asking some deep, probing questions of his ‘mother’. Mostly about why all his friends are Muppets.
8. American Beauty
When I first watched American Beauty at the age of fourteen it was a formative experience. As the credits rolled I felt like somewhere over the last two hours I had become a cinematic adult, henceforth only to watch arthouse films and thereby to become an interesting and unique teenager that girls would definitely want to sleep with. Also, I noted that arthouse films tended to involve more casual nudity, so that was a drawcard too. Of course, rewatching the film now it’s hard to avoid noticing that it’s an incredibly pretentious and kinda belaboured mess, but OMG THERE’S JUST SO MUCH BEAUTY IN THE WORLD.
7. The Dark Crystal
Man, animatronics. It was a glorious period in film when everyone thought animatronics was the way of the future. And The Dark Crystal played like an early ’80s manifesto for how film was going to be from here on in: clunky, robotic and eerily lifeless. I must admit, I only saw The Dark Crystal for the first time in 2006, after a girl I was semi-dating forced me to watch it on the grounds that it was impossible to be a complete human being without having seen it, but I think as we sat there we were both left questioning exactly how many cinematic and narrative sacrifices one has to make in order to create a film using nothing but robots. The answer: a lot. Witness here, the Skeksis in their mighty Trial by Stone. Riveting.
6. The Goonies
Another film that I only saw for the first time in my early twenties, The Goonies is enviable for its willingness to poke fun at fat kids, but not so much for anything else. I mean, it did give us the Truffle Shuffle – for which we can be forever thankful – but otherwise the film plays like a tribute to the old adage that when it comes to show business one should never work with children. Because children tend to have only one way of delivering their lines, which can basically be summed up in the word “forced”. Just shut up and dance, Chunk.
5. Bio-Dome
This could probably also read ‘Pauly Shore’s Entire Back Catalogue’, but Bio-Dome was always my pick of the bunch. For some reason. Indeed, when I was 10, I’m pretty sure I claimed Bio-Dome as my favourite film of all time. A claim I can probably safely now recant, as the movie is, quite obviously, dross. This clip, entitled “BEST OF BIO-DOME PT 1” (with the accompanying description “it gets no better”) is an 18 second testament to the general quality of comedy on offer.
4. Caravan of Courage
In our rush to deify the original Star Wars trilogy, I think sometimes we overlook the ever-so-undignified mad grab for cash that occurred in the immediate wake of its release. A period which wasn’t so much an exercise in canny franchising as it was an edition of Supermarket Sweep fuelled primarily by the blood of Ewoks. From action figures to lunch boxes to novels to Christmas Specials (featuring, for some reason, Bea Arthur singing in the Mos Eisley Cantina), if it could have an Ewok plastered on it, it was fair game for the good people at Lucasfilms. Hell, most people probably barely even remember the fact that in the two years following the release of Return of the Jedi, there were not one, but TWO separate films about Ewoks released. Two. Caravan of Courage was the first, in 1984. It was… awful. But starred a really very adorable Ewok named Wicket, a fact that seemed to short-circuit any particular critical eye most children could bring to the film. Here’s a sampling of the nail-biting excitement that is a day chilling with Ewoks on Endor.
Whee. And you better believe there’s another 90 minutes where that came from.
3. Spaceballs
How could a parody of Star Wars featuring a character named Pizza the Hut possibly go wrong?! Like this:
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
The difficulty of actually making fully grown men in bulky turtle outfits look like they could fight anything more complicated than a jam jar already meant that TMNT was a difficult franchise to send live-action. But by the time the second film rolled around the entire TMNT empire was beginning to lose some of its gloss, so in order to bulk out what was quite obviously a very shit film, the producers decided that now was the time to unleash their very own Shredder-esque secret weapon: Vanilla Ice.
In a word: gratuitous.
1. Milo and Otis
Milo and Otis was one of my most cherished childhood memories. When I looked back, it just seemed so warm and fuzzy and starred a pug, a fact that almost certainly paved the way for my now borderline pathological obsession with the breed. But, well, I made the mistake of watching it again a couple of weeks back and discovered that in addition to being poorly put together, boring as shit and starring a defeated sounding Dudley Moore as the narrator, it is also really quite hard to overlook what must have been a truly astonishing level of animal cruelty required to make Milo and Otis actually do what they were supposed to. There are estimates that the film went through up to 20 separate Milos over the course of the shooting and with the sheer number of times the cat appears to be physically thrown off ledges and cliffs it is not hard to believe. Also, at the end you see both a kitten and a pug puppy quite graphically being born. I can’t believe I wasn’t more scarred by that.
