Satellite Kid series

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) Days after watching its sequel, here is The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid to make it all make sense. No, that’s not true—Bud Spencer family movies are not exactly mazes of deceptive plotting, and so this is pretty much getting in 95 minutes what was summarized in the first moments of the sequel. It’s not much more than a cute kids’ adventure featuring Spencer acting as a teddy-bear sheriff protector to an alien incarnated as a likable boy. There’s nothing deep or challenging here, but it can be watched readily enough thanks to Spencer’s fuzzy-bear charm. The numerous comic stunts and silly fights find their intended public. Don’t go looking for Science Fiction in this comedy film chasing Close Encounters of the Third Kind box office numbers. Things are made slightly weirder thanks to the comical use of an alien gadget—and also for having the very Italian Spencer play an American sheriff in Georgia. This being said, the budget for The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid is visibly low, so don’t expect a polished presentation even by 1979 standards. At least it thrives on a rough kind of authenticity.

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) Bud Spencer comedies could get a bit out there, and Everything Happens to Me is at the outer end of what he could get away with: It’s a silly kid’s comedy in which Spencer shares screentime with a young boy playing an extraterrestrial. If the beginning feels unusually rich in plot and efficient in characterization, it’s because it’s a sequel to another movie. Spencer is his usual charismatic teddy-bear self in acting as a protector to the boy and getting into comic action scrapes throughout the film’s herky-jerky plot. It’s all clearly meant to be a succession of set-pieces at the expense of believability—and the low-budget production values don’t help at all. It does get less fun, as the film moves away from broad real-world comedy to more science-fictional content, which cannot be sustained by the budget or the tone of the film. Still, Everything Happens to Me can be fun if your expectations are low, although the film does rely on Spencer’s considerable likability.