My Girl 2 * (1994, Anna Chlumsky, Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis, Richard Masur, Christine Ebersole, Austin O’Brien) – Classic Movie Review 5775

Returning director Howard Zieff’s 1994 comedy is the struggling and none too welcome sequel to My Girl (1991), with Anna Chlumsky, Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Masur all returning from the original.

It is a pretty ghastly second helping of Seventies-set family sitcom, in which the now 13-year-old Pennsylvania hypochondriac tomboy undertaker’s girl Vada Sultenfuss (Chlumsky) sets off to Los Angeles in search of knowledge about her mother, who died at childbirth.

The movie starts pleasantly enough with Aykroyd as her grumpily amiable widowed father trying to rearrange the family house to accommodate his funeral cosmeticist new wife Shelly (Curtis) as she prepares to give birth. But then it plunges into a bucket of marshmallow when Chlumsky takes the plane West to stay with her uncle (Masur), who has moved in with a garage owner (Christine Ebersole).

The latter’s 13-year-old son (Austin O’Brien) is bribed to be Chlumsky’s tour guide – and soon the screen is just overflowing with tears, pre-pubescent kisses, marriage proposals and babies being born (the latter admittedly not involving the two 13-year-olds) and worst of all film of Chlumsky’s late mom singing Chaplin’s Smile though Your Heart Is Broken. Yuk!

The second half of the film, without the genial Aykroyd and Curtis, and with all this schmaltz is truly unbearable. Though, alas, no one gets killed by an attack of ‘just too many bees’ this time, and, alas again, there is no flashback sequence showing the heroine’s best friend Thomas J (Macaulay Culkin)’s death by bees in part one, it is still just about a notch up from the first film.

It is hard to imagine anyone actually liking it, however.

Also in the cast are John David Souther, Richard Beymer, Aubrey Morris, Gerrit Graham, Keone Young, Ben Stein and Jodie Markell.

This time it is written by Janet Kovalcik, based on the characters created by Laurice Elehwany.

Talking of bees, there are so many bad bee movies – starting with The Swarm, Killer Bees, The Savage Bees, The Deadly Bees and The Bees. Bee off with you, bee movies!

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5775

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