Stewart Raffill

  • Mac and Me (1988)

    Mac and Me (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) Nowadays, Mac and Me has become infamous largely due to its lead actor Paul Rudd’s tendency to use it as a fake preview of his upcoming films whenever he goes on talk shows. That’s still better than anything it deserves. It doesn’t take thirty seconds watching Mac and Me to realize that it’s going to be a terrible film, as aliens in repulsive makeup are whisked away from an alien planet to Earth on a NASA probe. Having broken all sorts of laws of physics in its opening scene, the rest of the film isn’t any better: The bad makeup and special effects are a constant reminder that this wasn’t meant to be a good film in the first place, and the screenwriting remains merely serviceable at its very best. This conscious attempt to ape E.T.’s success goes through the usual boy-meets-alien formula, except with a hideous alien and an even more grotesque product placement deal with Coca Cola and MacDonald’s (which features in a birthday party dance sequence that I won’t even try to describe any further). The famously terrible sequence in which a disabled kid is dropped in a lake for laughs is probably worse than you’d expect, and so is Mac and Me in general. There are, to be fair, many movies of comparable quality in which kids meet monsters, aliens or other fantastical creatures—but most of them have understood that the creature must be somewhat likable or cute. This is not the case here, and that only underscores the shoddiness of the film. The production history of the film confirms many suspicions—that the marketing drove the film, and that director Stewart Raffill was essentially asked to put together a complete movie from nothing (not even a script) with very little advance notice. The result, unsurprisingly, is terrible, rooted in the worst instincts of cynical Hollywood pandering to the family-film market. There is little joy to be had watching Mac and Me—just pain and inordinate second-hand embarrassment.

  • The Ice Pirates (1984)

    The Ice Pirates (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Even knowing that The Ice Pirates is supposed to be a B-grade Science Fiction satire is not quite enough to reconcile me with the daft result shown on-screen. The first few minutes are certainly laborious, as the film makes little attempt to camouflage its low budget or its ludicrous sense of comedy. As a crew of space pirates chases down water (already we’re in bad SF territory), it’s all cheap costumes, leather outfits, ridiculous attitude and campy intentions. The SF devices are dumb, the comedy is dumb and the film itself is dumb. Some of the gags are fit to make people gag rather than laugh, and the visual look of the film seems inches away from horror at times. To be fair, The Ice Pirates does improve slightly the longer it goes on, possibly because viewers eventually get used to the film’s low-end aims. There is a semi-amusing take on Mad Max 2 midway through, and the ending does sport a demented and relatively clever take on relativistic time, although I’d be overstating things if I advanced that it redeemed anything in the rest of the film. (For all I know, I’m reading too much into a plot development from a movie that seems to be making it up as it goes along.) Mary Crosby is deservedly featured on the poster, but most contemporary viewers will get a far bigger kick of seeing distinguished serious screen legend Anjelica Huston as a leather-clad space pirate pin-up able to swordfight and drive a spaceship. Alas, The Ice Pirates is nowhere near what it should have been even as a parody of SF movies up to that point. It’s too juvenile for adults and too smutty for kids and generally too dumb for everyone. Consider that its director, Stewart Raffill, is also responsible for Mac and Me, Mannequin 2: On the Move as well as Tammy and the T-Rex—geez. Wasted opportunities and all that—The Ice Pirates fails to meet even its low ambitions.