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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 69CINEMAA Future Camp Classic
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
TITLE: HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID
DIRECTOR: Randal Kleiber
WRITERS: Thom Eberhardt, Peter Elbling and Garry Goodrow
THE BOTTOM LINE: Paced like a cheerful comedy, the movie
busily denies its true, quite perverse nature.
Godzilla with diaper rash? The terrible twos writ terribly
large? How to characterize a film about a baby whose eccentric
inventor father accidentally turns him into a 112-ft.-tall
monster and who toddles off toward the bright lights of Las
Vegas, wreaking innocent havoc along the way?
The film's creators resolutely play it for laughs. The
actors gamely keep striking comic poses and speaking their lines
just as if they were funny, though they rarely are. But Honey,
I Blew Up the Kid (which, as the title implies, is a sequel to
the megasleeper of three summers ago) is actually a horror
movie -- a horror movie that is deep in denial, refusing to own
up to its essentially dark, not to say twisted, nature. There
are moments when you find yourself wishing Disney had turned
the darned thing over to David Lynch and let him make a damned
thing of it.
Or that they had more closely calculated the effect of
having Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) reverse the process that
made the first picture so successful. When Wayne inadvertently
shrank his kids to the size of insects, he turned them into
victims whose plight evoked -- dare one say it? -- a degree of
pity and terror. Well, a certain agreeable suspense at the very
least. But this time, when Pop accidentally inflates the kids'
little brother Adam (played by twins Daniel and Joshua
Shalikar), he creates not so much a sympathetic character as a
really nightmarish creature.
Like, say, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms or any of the
other gigantic projections of our early atomic-age anxieties.
Like them, Adam is the product of careless science run amuck.
Like them, he is pre-moral, not amenable to reason. And like
them, his most gripping moments occur when he is looming over
a cowering city, with older brother and his girlfriend (Robert
Oliveri and Keri Russell) tucked in his pocket and distinctly
at risk, since they and their car look like toys to him.
At this point Honey gets very interesting. You can have a
good -- or, anyway, a weird -- time at this movie if you keep
rewriting it in your head as it careens along. For this is one
of those rare moments when moviemakers, going about the routine
business of digging for sequel gold, have struck a rich vein of
surrealism and need our help in identifying the treasure they
have found: the stuff of what may someday be a camp classic.