Hugh Lampman Movies
- 1990
- PG
An adoptive parent discovers that some children are given up by their biological parents for very good reasons in this dark comedy. Ben Healy (John Ritter) is a pleasant but brow-beaten yuppie working for his father Big Ben (Jack Warden), a tyrannical sporting goods dealer. Ben would love to have a son, but his wife Flo (Amy Yasbeck) has been unable to conceive. Ben approaches less-than-scrupulous adoption agent Igor Peabody (Gilbert Gottfried) with his dilemma, and Igor presents Ben and Flo with a cute seven-year-old boy, Junior (Michael Oliver). However, Junior is hardly a model child; mean-spirited and incorrigible, the child leaves a path of serious destruction in his wake, and is even pen pals with Martin Beck (Michael Richards), a notorious serial killer. After the cat ends up in the hospital, the house catches on fire, and Junior displays his effective but unethical method for winning in Little League, Ben is having serious doubts about Junior when Beck escapes from jail and decides to kidnap his faithful correspondent, along with Junior's new mom. Problem Child proved to be a major box office success, spawning two sequels and a TV series. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- John Ritter, Michael Oliver, (more)
When faced with graduation, four seniors plot to prolong their college experience for fear of steady employment, but they're also loathe to leave behind their accommodating housemate Sylvia (played with mute, topless allure by a pre-Three's Company Priscilla Barnes), who functions as a live-in maid and concubine ("Where else are we going to find a nympho who loves to cook and clean house?"). In between sumptuous meals and bouts in the sack, the boys pester their parents to pay for post-graduate studies, without success. Luckily, a Poindexter science major named Arnold is desperate to lose his virginity to Sylvia, so the guys trade her sexual favors for his complicity in an elaborate scam. He's the only trusted assistant of reclusive genius Professor Heigner (Alan Reed, the voice of Fred Flintstone), a three-time Nobel Prize winner studying the mating habits of mosquitoes. Foundations are eager to fund the professor's work with generous grants, and since Heigner signs anything Arnold hands him without question, the seniors draft their own letter of request for cash and claim to be studying the sexual habits of college-age girls. It works, and with a 50,000-dollar-grant they offer coeds a 20-dollar honorarium to participate in the study by engaging in any kind of sex they like with our four heroes as the only male volunteers. Eventually, exhaustion and avarice lead them to expand the study and allow local businessmen to take part for a 50-dollar fee, which leads to huge profits. Only the intervention of "the establishment" will show the seniors the folly of their ways, when they enter into partnership with a feminine hygiene corporation and find themselves targeted for murder. The female head of the foundation that funds the seniors' project mistakenly believes that Professor Heigner is some sort of sexual dynamo and pursues him endlessly, leading the misanthropic scientist to chase her away by firing a rifle at her, spraying her with sticky white fire extinguisher foam, and setting a blaze beneath her while she frantically climbs up a chimney. Endless lines of co-eds wait breathlessly for the chance to copulate with strangers for a double sawbuck (it's all in the name of science, after all, and why not earn money for something they'd be "giving away" otherwise?). ~ Fred Beldin, All Movie Guide
