Director: Kenny Ortega
Cast: Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Thora Birch
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. But I may be one of those people who didn’t come to the film on numerous airings on cable. It had an odd effect on me back then, but it’s possible a film which is unassailably played for laughs somehow unsettles a child under the age of ten. One might say there is something I saw it in the theater. Which, blah, blah, blah, I miss going to. I’d go to see almost anything, if it wasn’t a wildly irresponsible thing to do.
Cut to this very film being run at the local drive in currently, and me not wanting to go anyway. We’re all a big puddle of contradictions, no?
Did I Like It: It is, easily, the second-best Halloween-themed, non-cell-animated, Disney film of 1993.
That reads as a dig, I’m sure, but I’m pretty sure I intended it as a pledge of allegiance to The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). The film is amiable enough, and objectively has the same kind of broad comedic mugging one might have experienced in a bygone era from either the Marx Brothers, Abbott, or Costello. It also has an early Amblin-esque energy about it that, while it never reaches for the pathos Spielberg could so easily achieve, even in his worst movies, it is as winning a framework to deliver entertainment as any.
Ultimately, I can’t fault a film entirely when both a) it clearly isn’t/wasn’t made for me and b) the three leads appear to be having a great deal of fun in their shenanigans. It’s little touches that capture my imagination after all these years, though. Primarily the delight in seeing Doug Jones do anything, but the idea that Garry and Penny Marshall are playing a married couple when they were, in fact, siblings, is definitely one of those strange quirks of cinema that one can’t help but dwell upon.