The Wizard (1989, Todd Holland)

Todd Holland directed many hilarious episodes of The Larry Sanders Show and several good episodes of Twin Peaks, so I at least knew this would be competently staged pablum. There's discernible skill on display in what he admitted at a New Beverly Cinema screening was simply grist for Fred Savage's potential film career and Nintendo payola. Despite the a heartwarming spin on Rain Man for kids with Nintendo in Reno substituting cards in Vegas, the screenplay was apparently written by David Chisholm with video games as an incidental skill chosen because kids play Super Mario and not poker. Once Nintendo was chosen by Universal to supply the games, the exclusive tie-in potential multiplied and two scenes were created which give this film its infamous reputation for campy crass commercialism: a climactic tournament of the soon to be released Super Mario Brothers 3, and a run-in with a bully who wields Nintendo's disastrous peripheral waste of money, The Power Glove - a futuristic looking glove which supposedly enabled what the Wii now does: motion controlled gaming. The latter is especially hilarious, yet Holland reigned in the entire rest of the film with the banal professionalism of a director who, as he described, pitched himself to the producers as someone whose ignorance of video games guaranteed their inclusion wouldn't happen at the story's expense. Unfortunately this principled approach leaves only a smarmy kids movie in which children go on the run to teach their parents a lesson and eventually triumph by outsmarting the cretinous boob adults who surround them, cracking wise all the way. Will Seltzer is particularly annoying as the missing child locator who hates kids and the parents he's ostensibly supposed to be helping.

The scenes to do with Nintendo are the only reason anyone remembers this tripe. There is also a fine pitch for the Universal Studios Theme Park when the moppets are chased through the King Kong ride and past park employees dressed as Frankenstein and Charlie Chaplin. There's never enough blatant tacky promotion of Nintendo to keep things interesting, nor even an attempt to work video games into the kids' characters - despite their mutual hobby, not once does Fred Savage roll his eyes and exclaim "Game Over, man!" which is disappointing. Compared to that other great landmark in product placement feature filmmaking Mac and Me, which had ET knockoff aliens being brought back from the grave with Coke and McDonald's, The Wizard is tame. Mac also had a total lack of respect for the audience, which ironically makes it more entertaining in retrospect. Despite Luke Edwards' character having some kind of post-trauma mute autism, his handicap is never exploited tastelessly the way Mac's wheelchair using lead boy was thrown off a freaking cliff so Mac could save him. Unless you count the funny moments when Fred Savage, like Tom Cruise, uses his savant brother to hustle "video heads" on the road to Reno for quick cash. In a delightful turn of ignorant screenwriting and child wish fulfillment, said vidiots are businessmen who bet money with 12 year olds over Double Dragon. If only there were more such nonsense to liven things up, instead of being quickly parsed plot functions! Having video games mentioned in "real" media, like movies and television, used to happen so infrequently it would send gamers into fits of ecstasy comparable only to comic book readers when some magazine interview with a famous person revealed they had a favorite super hero.

The retro hipsters in the theater with me had to wait good and long for a few seconds of Nintendo footage on 35mm to cheer. After the infamous Bully-With-A-Powerglove scene there's a good long wait until the Super Mario Brothers 3 scene, which somehow makes it all worth it if you catch a viewing with a crowd of game dorks. These are the only two scenes in which Holland has to try making people playing video games seem exciting on screen, and in this one the game is neither competitive for multiple players nor has been released. The film at least acknowledges this, before having one of Edwards' friends yell out tips about hidden secrets she couldn't possibly know. How? Why? Easy, for the kids at home to try when they buy Super Mario Brothers 3. All the rapid cuts between possibly the greatest game ever made, Fred Savage's reaction shots and the histrionic actor playing a way overexcited video game MC are what finally elevate The Wizard to high nostalgia camp, but only for the moment. There's no reason to recommend the film in full, the rest is too dull by comparison. Everyone with a career is simply, competently phoning it in, from Fred Savage to Lloyd Bridges as his dad and Christian Slater as his older brother. Everyone without a career is mugging like crazy, especially the aforementioned child bounty hunting villain who somewhat resembles a whiny Clarence Boddicker. Only Jenny Lewis as Savage's love interest registers any kind of charisma, selling their eventual obligatory PG love scene where Savage alone cannot.

View the best bits on YouTube and skip this, the funniest video game trash movie classic of all time is Joy Sticks.

Once Upon A Girl (1976, Don Jurwich)

Fairy tales have been interpreted as rape parables by feminists for years so they already make a perfect fit for boners. Like x-rated animated features, there's also a small niche of live action erotic fairy tale comedies with the sophistication of a snickering eleven year old. Animated fairy tales have the extra benefit of being instantly identifiable with Disney's most frequently adapted material, which is why you see cheap knockoffs in the dollar bin at the grocery store for undiscriminating grandparents to bring frustrated children who wanted the real Little Mermaid and not the Sri Lankan knockoff.

Once Upon A Girl owes existence to Ralph Bakshi's 1972 film Fritz the Cat, a feature length animated movie for adults. Bakshi's best films were all ahead of him and so too were the imitators on Fritz's heels, eschewing the satirical stories of Robert Crumb and Bakshi's beautifully lively animation for a lot of gratuitous dirtiness. The number of actual porno cartoon features is small, since decades from South Park any animation for an adult audience had to be produced for dingy grindhouse programming. In the wake of Fritz's financial success, the era of novelty x-rated animation - which ended with 1981's Heavy Metal - produced a lot of gratingly witless weirdness wherein every sexual reference or naked cartoon girl is lingered upon naughtily like a child who's just learned to swear.

The live action segments which intersperse OUAG also bring Ralph Bakshi to mind, except here they're so obviously time filler to save just a few minutes of expensive animation. In the film's single live set, a transvestite Mother Goose played by Hal Smith ("Otis" on The Andy Griffith Show) is on trial for obscenity and retells the stories of Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Room to a room of very 1970s looking young people off the street. The twist is, get this, all the stories are dirty! The animation for all three segments is mostly competent and completely lifeless, fitting the state of the medium in 1976. The cast is mostly all humans, drawn with the stiff posture and expresionless faces to be found on increasingly incompetent Saturday Morning programming emulating Scooby Doo. According to the hosts of The Silent Movie Theater some Josie and the Pussycats storyboard artists contributed to this film and it shows in the female anatomy on display, which like Josie is a blander, more realistic version of Dan Decarlo's Bettie and Veronica design. The mannequin men and the semi-proportional women who populate the rest of the show have about three expressions each to convey themselves, mainly by raising and lowering the eyebrows over their dot eyes. Other casualties of the animated times include a wonky, incessant synthesizer score and shrill voice acting. Jack's voice in the Beanstalk story has a stutter, which is not only unfunny and annoying but probably saved a few precious dollars of screen time, having him flap his mouth hole a longer amount of time.

The very dull animation makes the ensuing slapstick sex so cardboard that the intercourse itself is banal by repetition. There a lot of fucking, tits and boners, punctuating by lousy voice acting about the clap and other explicit talk assuming hilarity for being spoken in a cartoon. Unfortunately once the initial shock wears off at the end of the first story, the following are tedious and mostly predictable. The only truly amusing moments come from fleeting gags involving animal sidekicks with hard ons - much less disturbing than cartoon humans with them - and a mincing homosexual troll under a bridge. A few misguided attempts at pioneering sexual slapstick occasionally liven the monotony, such as when Jack hides from the Giant inside the Giant's wife. Otherwise, a bore and a chore. The disbelief at what you are seeing - by now only accounting for the age of the style - is quickly surpassed by disbelief that this had a viable audience. With shock value diminished by time, there's nothing to recommend to this except kitsch novelty, and shoddy kitsch too.