The Goonies. Richard Donner. 1985.

I bought a blu-ray of Gremlins, and this movie was included. It’s not something I would have considered (re-)watching: I just barely vaguely remember watching it as a teenager and (I think) feeling that it was the lamest thing ever.

But when I’m watching it now, I think… that’s it’s super-lame.

It’s offensively lame. There’s so much shouting. So much drama. So many lines that are meant to be jokes that barely register as such.

There’s some good points. The kids are good. Did all of them go on to become stars? Let’s see… Sean Astin: Check. Josh Brolin: Check. Corey Feldman: Er… I don’t know how to categorise him. Jeff Cohen: No. Ke Huy Quan: I guess not.

That’s a pretty good percentage, though. Let’s call it 50%.

And Anne Ramsey is iconic.

Perhaps I should give it props for having pretty ugly cinematography and design work. I mean, real: The dirt looks dirty, the neighbourhoods looks muddy, and some of the actors’ hair moves.

Exactly:

It’s a charmless exercise: director Richard Donner turns the kids into shrieking ferrets

And it’s a bit on the racist side? But the main problem is that it’s tedious and annoying.

Right:

While I did manage to catch bits and pieces over the years (namely the opening of the film), it wasn’t until college that I got introduced to the film in its entirety. And, as many fans often do, it was pitched to me as “the greatest movie ever made!” So I sat there, baffled for 114 minutes that my friends – folks I know well and respect – were so taken by such a boring, surprisingly dull little movie. Even after the film had ended my friends couldn’t really tell me what they liked about the movie. They just…liked it. In fact, all they could do was agree that most of the film was pretty weak.

The first four hours of this movie were pretty annoying, but the last seventeen hours were a bit more exciting. But it’s pretty charmless. Perhaps you have to be twelve to enjoy this.

King Kelly of the USA. Leonard Fields. 1934.

I remember saying to somebody like five years ago “I’ve never seen a movie from the 30s or 40s I haven’t enjoyed”. But of course that was massive survivorship bias: The movies I had seen from that era were the ones that were the ones that were good enough to be in circulation eighty years later.

So watching the movies on the two public domain DVD box sets has been an eye-opener. There’s no filtering for quality here, but instead just whatever the people making the sets were able to get their hands on — for free.

In conclusion: They sure made lame movies back then, too.

But this isn’t one of those movies.

This is weird.

On a scale of “that’s a weird movie” this scores a “whaaaa…??”

I’m not sure whether they were all eating peyote in their omelettes by mistake or they were just insane.

The director made four movies in the early 30s, and then no more, which is understandable.

But I kinda love this, because it’s just so weird. Well. Bits of it. It’s not a good movie, but it’s something to behold.

Gremlins 2. Joe Dante. 1990.

This is a lot funnier than I remember! I sort of remember this as a horror movie. Or perhaps I’m misremembering.

I think I must be.

There’s a bunch of fun, goofy scenes here, and a huge number of incidental sight gags, but it doesn’t quite hang together. It’s very 80s, which I like: The plot starts off very slowly and sort of congeals. Or escalates. It feels Xmas-ey in the formless way the movie happens.

This sounds very stupid, but I hadn’t considered 80s American entertainment movies to have a specific aesthetic in this way: But they’re basically movies made by people who are nostalgic for the screwball comedies of the 40s and the monster movies of the 50s. It works beautifully, I think, but this sort of thing hasn’t been possible since.

So it’s a bit bewildering that there weren’t more sequels to this franchise, but perhaps time had just passed for this sort of thing.