Clifford (1994) Comedy/Orion RT: 90 minutes Rated PG (language, some violence, harmful pranks, brief nudity) Director: Paul Flaherty Screenplay: Jay Dee Rock and Bobby Von Hayes Music: Richard Gibbs Cinematography: John A. Alonzo Release date: April 1, 1994 (US) Cast: Martin Short, Charles Grodin, Mary Steenburgen, Dabney Coleman, Richard Kind, Jennifer Savidge, Ben Savage, G.D. Spradlin, Anne Jeffreys, Don Galloway. Box Office: $7.4 million (US)
Rating: NO STARS!!!
Go ahead and file Clifford under “WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?” right alongside It’s Pat: The Movie and Baby Geniuses. Martin Short (SCTV) stars as a 10YO boy who puts Damien Thorn in the running for instant sainthood. He makes Junior from the Problem Child movies look like a little angel. He’s a very bad little boy.
It’s one thing when a supposed comedy simply isn’t funny. I wish it was that simple with Clifford, but it’s not. This movie is creepy. It’s creepy in a way that makes your skin crawl. The idea of an adult actor playing a child isn’t terrible in and of itself. It works in five-minute sketches on SNL. But a 90-minute feature film? Nope!
The creepy part is the character himself. Clifford is spoiled, sneaky, obnoxious, selfish, manipulative, spiteful, crafty, vindictive, cruel, depraved and just plain evil. His pranks are malicious. He has odd verbal mannerisms, saying things like, “Oh yes, my uncle.” He fawns up to adults trying to spot their weaknesses. He never lets go of Steffen, a little toy dinosaur he talks to and blames for his actions. He even looks weird dressed in a school blazer and short pants. He smiles angelically until he doesn’t get his way, then he gets this detached, psychotic look on his face. Clifford is the kind of kid that tempts you to change your opinion on child abuse. Clifford is the kind of movie that stuns you into stupefied silence.
For whatever reason, the movie opens in 2050 with kindly old priest Father Clifford (Short in not very convincing old age makeup) counseling a troublesome boy (Savage, Boy Meets World) by telling him about his own youth. We then flash back to present-day with 10YO Clifford on a plane to Honolulu with his parents. He’d much rather go to Los Angeles so he can visit a theme park called Dinosaur World. So what does a boy like Clifford do to achieve his goal? He visits the cockpit and shuts off the plane’s engines, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing in L.A. resulting in Clifford being justifiably banned from the plane.
Lucky for Clifford’s long-suffering parents, his Uncle Martin (Grodin, Beethoven) lives in L.A. and agrees to watch the boy until they return. It isn’t out of familial love or loyalty that Martin takes the little bastard in, he uses it as an opportunity to prove to his fiancee Sarah (Steenburgen, Parenthood) that he likes children. Where in the world would she get the idea that Martin doesn’t like or want kids? Could it be the brand new one-bedroom house he just purchased for them?
Martin promises that he will take Clifford to Dinosaur World, but is forced to break that promise when his boss (Coleman, Nine to Five) gives him two days to redesign his plans for a citywide transportation system. This causes Clifford to act out which results in his uncle punishing him by not taking him to Dinosaur World at all. That’s when Clifford really cuts loose and makes his uncle’s life a living hell. He sabotages his relationship with Sarah, gets him fired from his job and drives him insane.
Clifford isn’t a comedy; it’s Fatal Attraction by way of The Good Son. It’s marketed as a family movie, but no parent in their right mind should allow their children to watch it under any circumstances. To do otherwise either constitutes some form of child abuse or violates the Constitutional Amendment outlawing cruel and unusual punishment. It depends on the situation.
Clifford is one of the casualties of Orion Pictures’ declaration of bankruptcy in ’91. It sat on the shelf alongside RoboCop 3, Car 54, Where Are You? and The Favor for a few years until the studio could afford distribution. Forget about releasing it, it shouldn’t have been made at all. Did anybody really think it was a good idea? If so, what drugs were they on at the time?
Clifford achieves a whole different level of bad. The only decent thing about it is Grodin. He’s one of the best underactors in Hollywood and his slow-burn performance is the one bright spot in this dismal affair. But it begs the question of what possessed him to sign on. Did he need the money that badly? He’s better than this. Grodin semi-retired from acting the same year Clifford was released, but I suspect he really went into hiding to avoid further embarrassment.
So how is it that Short appears to be about a foot shorter than his co-stars? It’s a combination of trick photography, oversized props and the other actors standing on boxes. Notice that you mostly see them from the waist up in their scenes with Short. The only effect this achieves is creeping out the viewer. There’s something profoundly unsettling about it. As a gimmick, it fails. But would it have been better to have an actual child play the role? In all likelihood, no. It would be wrong for an entirely different set of reasons.
We’ve seen our fair share of movies and TV shows about bad kids from Dennis the Menace to the aforementioned Problem Child series. Clifford makes any of these kids seem positively angelic by comparison. Like I said earlier, his pranks are malicious. His acts of misbehavior include replacing his uncle’s Bloody Mary with tobasco sauce, blowing up his presentation at work, tricking him into leaving town so he can throw a wild party, pretending that his uncle tied him up as punishment and getting him falsely arrested at Sarah’s parents’ anniversary party for calling in a phony bomb threat (after some tinkering with his answering machine message). Clifford does all this with the psychotic glee of a serial killer. He’s not just your garden variety rotten kid; he’s a little sociopath. You’ll have to summon up all your might to resist the temptation to try and reach through the screen to strangle the little creep with your bare hands.
Clifford contains a scene in which Coleman attempts to assault Steenburgen in the back of limo. This has NO place in a PG movie. It’s neither funny nor appropriate. How do you explain this to an innocent 8YO? Nothing that happens in this abortion of a comedy is even remotely funny. At the anniversary party, Clifford loudly asks Martin, “What’s a face-lift?” embarrassing his uncle and several guests at the same time. He also compliments the uncle’s boss on his toupee. In my day, this would have earned a kid a smack right in the mouth.
Clifford is badly directed (by Paul Flaherty of Who’s Harry Crumb?) and badly written. It’s poorly made from start to finish. The climax at Dinosaur World makes the old Land of the Lost shows look like examples of stellar special effects work. The talented cast is positively wasted. The feel-good ending feels phony and insincere. After everything this kid has done, there’s no redemption. Clifford is bad on levels that haven’t even discovered yet. It transcends every known definition of the term. It’s so bad, it’s almost (emphasis on almost) worth seeing just to see how bad it is. However, I don’t recommend it.
