Problem Child (Dennis Dugan, 1990)
My parents were so angry I watched this. I was at a friend’s house and we spent the afternoon laughing our rear ends off about this. There’s a scene at a fair in which a clown is punched. We rewound and replayed the scene at least four times. Laughter until it hurts. I wish I had more of that in my life these days. Not to say I don’t laugh, but that level of absurd guffawing is pretty seldom.
I immediately wanted to watch the sequel. Mom pulled out Leonard Maltin and read a sentence that ran something like “any parent who lets an impressionable child watch this movie should have their head examined,” and that was that. This was an Enormous Injustice, I felt. The third film was already being advertised on the back of my Donald Duck comics, and I needed to catch up. Actually, I would have taken the third one, too. Continuity and spoiler-obsession weren’t things then.
My desire to watch the second movie waned. Now, today, October 2016, I can confidently say that I would actively refuse to watch it. I sort of wonder if I maybe did get to see it? I have vague memories of a film that was a little dull and had none of the original’s perceived anarchy. I don’t know if I thought that at the time. But I was maybe six or seven; my opinion was hardly so developed and the movie is really just entertainment.
In the end I only remember one part of this: that stupid scene with the clown. It made me laugh very hard once. Probably that’s enough.