Honey, I Blew Up the Kid

Take this one for what it is, an entertaining Disney comedy of really large proportions, and you'll have a ball. Take it as anything else and you'll wish you'd rented The Bicycle Thief instead. For all two of you that missed the original Rick Moranis vehicle Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Moranis stars as wacky inventor cum family man Wayne Szalinski, a scatterbrained Disney archetype who just wants to benefit mankind. When Szalinski comes up with a method to enlarge matter (and thereby Feed the World), it seems as if his dream of being accepted into the scientific community is about to come true. Unfortunately, one night while tinkering in his lab, Szalinski's two-year-old son Adam inadvertently steps in front of the beam and begins to grow, eventually reaching an epic 112 feet. Even Allison Hayes in Bert I. Gordon's Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman only reached...well, you know. There are surprisingly few “My, how you've grown” and “The last time I saw you, you were knee-high...” jokes here, and that's good. Screenwriters Thom Eberhardt and co. keep the obvious in the background and manage to fashion this delightfully silly idea into a very enjoyable 90 minutes of pure Disney mayhem. Since the Big Baby is now drawn to electricity (which, for some unknown reason, encourages his accelerated growth rate), the filmmakers have him stomping around Las Vegas' Fremont Avenue -- aka Glitter Gulch, the single largest concentration of electrical power in the U.S. It's a hoot to see this goofy kid in his red corduroy jumper terrorizing all those teeny Las Vegans, but is this what Bugsy Siegel was really thinking of all those years ago?