Honey, I Blew Up the Kid ** (1992, Rick Moranis, Marcia Strassman, Robert Oliveri, Amy O’Neill) – Classic Movie Review 5649

Randal Kleiser is the new director in 1992 for the inevitable sequel to Disney’s 1989 hit Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, again indebted to ideas and inspiration from Fifties sci-fi fantasy movies – this time especially The Amazing Colossal Man (1957).

This time jolly boffin Professor Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis)’s two-year-old toddler son Adam wanders in front of his enlargement ray machine and is soon as tall as King Kong.

The family tracks the 112ft boy down to Las Vegas, home of the world’s largest amount of electrical energy. With that knowledge, can Moranis’s Professor Szalinski blow the kid down in size again?

This easygoing, sweet-natured sci-fi comedy is entertaining enough, but this time round suffers from a milder script (this time by new writers Tom Eberhardt, Peter Elbling and Garry Goodrow) and meeker performances. The freshness and inventiveness of the original are understandably missing, but the movie is still quite fun and the trick work is again exciting.

Marcia Strassman returns as the professor’s wife Diane Szalinski, Robert Oliveri returns as Nick Szalinski and Amy O’Neill returns as Amy Szalinski, and also in the cast are Daniel Shalikar and Joshua Shalikar as Adam, Lloyd Bridges, John Shea, Keri Russell, Kenneth Tobey, Gregory Sierra, Ron Canada and Julia Sweeney.

It cost a lot at $40 million and did not do as well, taking $58 million at the US box office. Will there be yet another sequel? (Yes there was, in 1997’s Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves.)

To 2017, Rick Moranis has made no appearance in a movie feature since 1997’s Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves. After his wife Ann Belsky’s death of breast cancer in 1991, aged 34, and raising their two sons alone, he retired from acting in 1997 apart from doing occasional voice work.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5649

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