Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992)

Boring, long, and too preachy.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID is the 1992 sequel to HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS. Its premise is much the same as many 1950s era B-movies, involving a character growing to gigantic proportions before wreaking havoc in a US city.The thing that wowed me with this production was the calibre of the special effects. The back projected scenes of the toddler stomping through the streets are integrated superbly with the actors and backdrops, as are the scenes when the toddler is a 'mere' seven foot tall. Back projection can sometimes look really obvious and cheesy, but never so here.Sadly, the film's storyline is a lot weaker. There's some initial set-up involving nutty scientists and the like, but once the kid starts growing it all falls by the wayside. Rick Moranis and Marcia Strassman, both returning from the original, have little to do other than chase around after their kid and act concerned, and there's a lot less of the camaraderie and high spirits from the first movie. The villain is poor, the script poorer, and it's all very forgettable come the inevitable climax.

I'll admit that I loved the first movie, "Honey, I shrunk the kids" with Rick Moranis (Ghostbusters) playing the usual dorky self where not only did his machine shrunk his kids along with two neighbor kids, it was quite an adventure without being too cute. In this sequel, it's not about tiny but about large in which this time around Wayne Szalinski (Moranis) has invented a machine to make things bigger than their normal size. His target this time is his newborn toddler Adam where he accidentally gets in the way of an experiment to make himself ten times bigger than Godzilla where he even rocks through Las Vegas and takes a guitar.I didn't like this film one bit where I thought it was too cute to bring in the baby as I wished that maybe somebody would've taken an animal and let them take a bite out of the writers.

Stars Rick Moranis.As the title says, this movie is about scientist Wayne Szalinski accidentally making his infant son Adam large. Adam runs rampant through the city in a stupid King Kong like story. After watching it, the film seems really pointless and kind of depressing. It's not that anything depressing happens in the film, it's just a depressing film. Where much of the first film was about the kid's being shrunk, in comparison very little is about the baby in this one. I guess if you enjoy Rick Moranis's work or if you want to watch it for Lloyd Bridge's small role then this is your movie, otherwise avoid it.My rating: * 1/2 out of ****.

My Take: Like always, special effects can't save this one. This sequel to the B-fantasy movie hit "Honey,I Shrunk the Kids" has a lesser formula compared to its predecessor, but it's still quite enjoyable, most especially for the kiddies. This sequel has Rick Moranis inventing another machine which, this time, makes things grow rather than shrinking. Well, accidentally, he blows up his baby to giant size. Moranis makes things funny, and the special-effects are great. Mostly, without Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna doing the writing job, it's mostly B-movie in style of the cult, camp movie "Attack of the 50-foot Woman", only this one has a kid.Its kinda fun for those boring nights, wherein you have nothing to do and mostly nothing to watch. It's not as much fun as the first, but as old-fashioned Disney movies go, this one ain't half bad. Rating: *** out of 5.