ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Remember when you were a kid and you could have fun all day long just by playing in your back yard — with wild adventures filled with danger, romance, and battles with hideous monsters?

Well, guess what! Those days are NOT gone!
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Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)

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_______ Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) Trailer


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The premise takes the serious notion of The Incredible Shrinking Man (57) and Fantastic Voyage (66), and transforms it into an amusing kids movie.

And it is funny — Rick Moranis stars as a goofy, loser inventor named Szalinski who is indeed a genius. He has a family — a wife and two kids — whom he can barely support (the wife, played by Marcia Strassman, seems to be the bread winner), but he's working on some kind of gun-like apparatus in his attic and it looks impressive.

Then, the accident: a neighbor's kid pops a baseball through the attic window and hits the gizmo. Four kids go up to inspect the damage and are hit by a beam which shrinks them to ant-size. Szalinski comes home in a bad mood and unknowingly sweeps them up with the garbage, depositing them in a bag just outside his back fence. To get back to the house, they traverse the back lawn.

But, to them, it's about 3 miles of jungle.

Moranis was born to play this role and he is great in this. The movie was a big hit and made him a comedy star for a time.

This was like an eighties/nineties version of a Jerry Lewis sixties role or maybe Don Knotts. Matt Frewer co-stars as the neighbor; he's sort of a douchebag and annoying, but also has his amusing moments.

The kids encounter an ant — which improbably becomes their servant & pet for a little while — and then a scorpion, which is not so friendly. There are also bees.

The FX are very good.

The ending suggests that Szalinki's invention will rapidly change the world — for the better (large amounts of food as the gizmo can be reversed to enlarge things), but this is not followed up on. The sequel was Honey, I Blew Up the Kid in 1992.

Then there was a direct-to-video 2nd sequel, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, in 1997. At this point, there was a TV series without Moranis which lasted 3 years. The inventor (Peter Scolari) in this had various other inventions to propel the stories along.

BoG's Score: 7.5 out of 10

Shrunken Trivia: The story in this film also has an eerie similarity to the novel The Micronauts by Gordon Williams, in that the main characters in that 1977 sf book also had to traverse a standard garden, except that the older story was serious in tone.


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)