Review: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

Thompson brothers Jared Rushton and Thomas Brown accidentally hit a baseball through their next door neighbour’s window. Said next door neighbour just so happens to be a scientist, named Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis- please come back!) who has invented a machine that can shrink matter. A machine that the kids have just accidentally activated with their baseball. Ergo, when they and Szalinski’s own kids (Amy O’Neill and Robert Oliveri) try to retrieve the ball, they find themselves in the machine’s line of fire and are shrunk to miniscule size. And then they get accidentally thrown out with the garbage! As the shrunken kids struggle with oversized insects through their trek from the backyard to the house, their parents are worried sick. Marcia Strassman plays Mrs. Szalinski, while Kristine Sutherland and an oafish Matt Frewer are the Thompsons.

 

I saw this Joe Johnston (director of “The Rocketeer”, “October Sky”, the shite “Jumanji”, the effective “Wolfman” remake) kiddie version of “The Incredible Shrinking Man” in cinemas back in 1989 when I was 9, and liked it well enough. Seeing it again in 2015 at age 35, it certainly holds up to that mild standard. Johnston’s directorial debut, it’s cute, clever, Rick Moranis is ideally cast, and the special FX certainly don’t come off looking embarrassingly all these years later. In fact, because the film is for the most part paying homage to 1957’s “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, it doesn’t matter that the FX aren’t mind-blowing (they were pretty good for 1989, though), it’s aiming for B-movie fun, and achieves it. If you go for A-level effects on a film like this, some of the nostalgic charm is lost. Only the blue-screen work disappoints, along with the weak performance by young Amy O’Neill as the teen daughter. The poor thing hasn’t got a chance with her mall-obsessed dialogue and pink wardrobe reminding me too much of the talking Malibu Stacy doll on “The Simpsons” (You’d swear she was about to cry: ‘Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl…’). The rest of the cast is tops, though, with Rick Moranis instantly perfect, Matt Frewer an interesting and hilarious choice for his pig-headed neighbour, and Kristine Sutherland looking just as MILFy here as she did years later as Buffy’s mum. What? Jared Rushton and Robert Oliveri are also perfectly chosen as the sons of Frewer and Moranis, respectively.

 

Although it seems more Ray Harryhausen (“Jason and the Argonauts”, “The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad”) than “Incredible Shrinking Man”, the ant vs. scorpion fight is a lot of fun, and so is the film. It’s not one of the more memorable films Disney has ever put out, but if you saw it as a kid, re-watching it does bring a smile to your face, and a few laughs. God I feel old, I swear I was 9 years old like, yesterday. Excellent, rather Danny Elfman-esque music score by the late James Horner (“Battle Beyond the Stars”, “Krull”, “Aliens”, “Braveheart”) is a definite highlight.

 

Director Johnston is an ILM graduate, and the FX come from such luminaries as the aforementioned ILM (“Star Wars”, “ET”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, “T2”), Phil Tippett (“Star Wars”, “Jurassic Park”, “Starship Troopers”), and David Allen (“Caveman”, “Q: The Winged Serpent”, the cheesy direct-to-video “Puppetmaster” series), among others. The screenplay is by Ed Naha (Stuart Gordon’s “Dolls”), Tim Schulman (“Dead Poets Society”, of all films), Brian Yuzna (producer of the immortal “Re-Animator”), and Stuart Gordon (director of “Re-Animator”, the mediocre “Dolls”, and the underrated “Fortress”), from a story by Gordon, Naha, and Yuzna. Good fun for the whole family!

 

Rating: B-