Junior (1994) - Frank fun in outrageous Reitman comedy

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A great star trio join forces for hilarity on this cheeky poster for Ivan Reitman's Junior

When scientists Arbogast and Hesse's project gets shut down, the smaller of the two get the bright idea that the bigger (they are both male) should let himself become impregnated in the lab.

 

Junior is written by Chris Conrad (Love Thy Neighbor (1984, TV movie)) and Kevin Wade (Key Exchange (1985)) and directed by Ivan Reitman (Foxy Lady (1971)).

The plot outline above explains this film, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger (Dave (1993)) gets pregnant and gives birth. The odd couple Danny DeVito (Jack the Bear (1993)) and Schwarzenegger, under the competent leadership of Reitman, once again give vivid life to a simple low-brow comedy. Junior serves gender clichés one after the other, but these are given with such spunk and innocence that one has to enjoy it. There are no shortage of weird and gross scenes in Junior, (not surprisingly given the premise), but the film could have been more fun.

 

Related posts:

Ivan Reitman: Evolution (2001) - Reitman's sci-fi crazy-comedy is thoroughly entertaining

Ghostbusters II (1989) - Reitman's unjustifiably maligned sequel 
Ghostbusters (1984) - Reitman and Co. conjure up the gleeful pomp and circumstance of the 1980s  

 

Watch a trailer for the movie here

 

Cost: 60 mil. $

Box office: 108.4 mil. $

= Big flop (returned 1.80 times its cost)

[Junior was released 14 November (North America) and runs 109 minutes. Schwarzenegger was paid 15 mil. $ for his performance; Emma Thompson (Last Christmas (2019)) got 1.5 mil. $. Shooting took place from April - June 1994 in California, including in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The film opened #4, behind holdover hits The Santa Clause, Star Trek: Generations and Interview with the Vampire, to a 9.8 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent 2 more weekends in the top 5 (#3-#5), grossing 36.7 mil. $ (33.9 % of the total gross). The film fared poorly compared to Reitman's preceding two Schwarzenegger vehicles, Twins (1988, also with DeVito) and Kindergarten Cop (1990), - both exceeded 200 mil. $ at the box office. The film was nominated for an Oscar: Best Song (Look What Love Has Done by Carole Bayer Sager, James Newton Howard, James Ingram and Patty Smyth), lost to Can You Feel the Love Tonight by Elton John and Tim Rice from The Lion King. It was also nominated for 3 Golden Globes, among other honors. Roger Ebert gave the film a 3.5/4 star review, translating to 2 notches over this one. Reitman returned with Father's Day (1997). Schwarzenegger returned in T2 3-D: Battle Across Time (1996, short) and theatrically in Eraser (1996); DeVito in Get Shorty (1995). Junior is rotten at 55 % at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Junior?

The Eye 2/見鬼2/Gin3 Gwai2 2 (2004) or, Women: Screaming and Crying

[ZERO]

+ 2nd Worst Movie of the Year

A lady in a blood-soaked hospital dress dragging herself across the floor makes up this poster for The Pang Brothers' The Eye 2

A young, pregnant woman attempts suicide numerous times, because she is heavily plagued by some spirits that she sees regularly.

The Eye 2 is the sequel to Danny and Oxide Pang, 'The Pang Brothers'' 2002 horror The Eye, written by Yuet-Jan Hui (The Eye) with Lawrence Cheng (Encore/Hot Choi (1980)) contributing story elements. This film is often involuntarily comical, and just as you think it cannot possibly deliver any more baloney, it brings you another head-shaking, laugh-inducing sequence. - However, it doesn't give enough fun to win a single heart here and unquestionably belongs in the exclusive grade-zero club of films wholly without merit.
When I was almost sure that The Eye 2 was just about over, it turned out it had another full 35 minutes of absurd nonsense left for me. The hands-down most annoying (but also a bit comical) feature of the film is that all of its women are struck dumb in a kind of impotent state throughout, which leaves them to only react to bad stuff with screaming, crying or - and this is also often the case, - screaming and crying. These emotional bouts are pretty much non-stop throughout the movie. The protagonist, - the only character we really meet, - is the prototype for this seemingly unthinking, eternally sobbing blob of a gender that women are made out to be in The Eye 2.
There are semi-religious elements, such as the heroine wanting to give birth to a reincarnated version of her boyfriend's deceased mother, and ridiculously humorous inventions, such as ghosts flying into the vaginas of women giving birth, (while, of course, they are screaming and crying loudly), - and some of the consistently poor taste of the film may have some cultural motivations lying behind it that I fail to grasp, (it's a Hong Kong/Singapore co-production.)
What is assured absolutely above any cultural differences is that the script, acting, directing and photography here seem like they are taken out of an early film school production. The music sounds like it comes from a bad reality TV show, and the film's shifts in tone are jarring; the editing is choppy, and the general experience seems like just a string of sequences playing one after the other without any sense of a central order of things. The grasp on suspense here is absent and deeply amateurish. The Eye 2 is all bad.

Related posts:
 

The 2000s in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

2004 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I] 
The Eye US remake: The Eye (2008) - French talents Moreau/Palud fail in Hollywood with Asian horror remake

Here is a French trailer for the original The Eye

Cost: Estimated 2.3 mil. $
Box office: In excess of 2.5 mil. $
= Uncertain
[The Eye 2 was released 18 March (Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand) and runs 95 minutes. The storyline is not related to that of The Eye, only in that it again is about clairvoyance and the ability to see ghosts. Shooting took place in Singapore, Bangkok, Thailand and in Hong Kong. The film was not released theatrically in North America. The gross listed above of 2.5 mil. $ is the cume of the only three markets that are made public, (Hong Kong, Italy and Thailand), of which Hong Kong makes up the biggest part with 1.2 mil. $. But the film was released in 13 other markets and 3 festivals, so this is not a complete gross. The Eye 3 (2005) takes the franchise in a horror-comedy direction, again made by The Pang Brothers. The Eye (2008) is a bad US remake with Jessica Alba. Danny Pang returned with Leave Me Alone/Ah Ma Yau Nan (2004) and Oxide Pang with Ab-normal Beauty/Sei Mong Se Jun (2004). 8,648 users at Rotten Tomatoes have given The Eye 2 a 3.2/5 rating.]

What do you think of The Eye 2?

Eraserhead (1977) - Lynch's extraordinary, unconquerably strange and surreal debut

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Jack Nance (Voodoo (1995)), with his characteristic crazy hairdo from the film, adorn the poster for David Lynch's Eraserhead

Henry walks around an industrial, very noisy neighborhood, where he seems to have fathered something ... nonhuman.

Eraserhead is the very abstract and strange feature debut from Montanan master writer-director David Lynch (Blue Velvet (1986)), who also acted as producer, editor and co-composer on it. It has a Luis Buñuel-reminiscent dinner scene and nightmarish scenes one after the other. - Eraserhead is generally a film like none other.
It elevates unpleasantness into high style but remains a cold acquaintance; chilling but not very emotionally stirring, probably because it is so outlandish. - Lynch already overcame this inhibition in his following film, period-set biopic The Elephant Man (1980).
Eraserhead is technically astonishingly well-made; both its images, sound design and effects are incredible. Eraserhead is extraordinary.

Related posts:

David Lynch: Blue Velvet (1986) or, The Strange World 

Dune (1984) - Lynch heads to space, with an (unsurprisingly) strange result

Top 10: The best biopic movies reviewed by Film Excess to date

The Elephant Man (1980) - Lynch's deeply moving second feature

Watch a clip of the 'lady in the radiator' from the film here

Cost: Reportedly 10-20k $
Box office: Reportedly 7 mil. $ (only USA)
= Mega-hit
[Eraserhead premiered 19 March (Filmex Festival, USA) and runs 88 minutes. Lynch was inspired by stories of Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol and the Bible as well as personal experiences of his own surrounding the birth of his daughter Jennifer with severely clubbed feet and living in a bad part of Philadelphia with his family. AFI's financing of the tiny-budgeted film was controversial, with the institute's dean threatening to quit if Lynch was not supported in his efforts. They erroneously assumed that his 21-page script would result in a short film. Instead, shooting of Eraserhead in LA, including at AFI's Center for Advanced Film Studies, lasted from May 1972 - October 1976, an extremely long and highly unusual principal photography, which was fraught with financial issues and an artist filmmaker involved in every detail of production. The film was seen by just 25 people on its opening night. It kept playing as a midnight feature in a few theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York for years, which got its gross up to the very impressive 7 mil. $. It further snailed its way out to theatrical releases in foreign countries over the course of the following three decades. Critically derided at its initial release, the film has since been hailed by many and been selected for preservation by the National Film Registry of the US in 2004. Stanley Kubrick told Lynch that Eraserhead was his favorite film around the shooting of Lynch's second film, The Elephant Man (1980), and it inspired Kubrick's masterpiece The Shining (1980) as well as countless other films and filmmakers since. Eraserhead is certified fresh at 91 % with an 8.3 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Eraserhead?