Joey, una storia meravigliosa

Now I have to admit it... "Joey" gave me the creeps as a child. Before watching it in recent times, I thought about it as a chilling, fairy tale of terror.

Now, to be objective, "Joey" is a movie that should be enjoyed by a younger audience because it's indeed a movie directed for a younger audience. Not to be redundant but as a kid you are easily impressed and scared by things like talking dummies or evil dolls.

"Joey" isn't meant to be scary and now as a grown-up I can only recommend it for a younger audience or for fans of movies involving dummies.

Still, I am pleased with the good memories I have towards this movie.

After young Joey's father dies, he starts to make his various toys come to life, including his friend, R2D2. He also begins to whom he believes to be his dead father via his red toy telephone. Turns out not to be his father, but an evil ventriloquist dummy (and really is there any other kind?). The dummy soon makes little Joey's life a nightmare. Not that his life was all roses before, mind you. He's the type of kid to be heavily bullied. This movie scared the poo out of me as a kid and I could see it still doing so if I were still a kid. But like "the Boogens", it hasn't aged well in the least. Who the hell would show this film to a little kid anyway?? now THAT'S just bad parenting right there.

My Grade: D

2-disc DVD Extras: both 79 & 98 minute versions of the film; and 2 theatrical Trailers for the American version, 1 for the German one

My girlfriend has a large VHS library she's trying to convert to DVD, but there are some films she's going to have a hard time finding, especially this one. Without looking at the box I was able to watch this movie and pinpoint the year of its release (The E.T. glass, the R.O.T.J. bed sheets and especially the teacher's Velcro shoes were dead giveaways to the production date). Fletcher was a good moment to reminisce about the official Lester dummy I used to have. I found out the hard way my girlfriend is deathly afraid of ventriloquist dummies. This movie was not among her faves when she was a kid because of this. My only complaints about the movie was a flub early in the movie, when Joey is picking up his backpack and you can clearly see the name "Josh" written on the baseball patch on the bag. Then there's the little black boy who conveniently disappears when the fit hits the shan only to turn up for the movie's lackluster finale. Smart move, kid. All in all, a decent movie for its time, but it's no Mac and Me, and that's saying a lot.

Making Contact is a terrible movie I saw as a kid about some little dork who's Dad dies and stupid stuff happens to him. Stuff comes alive, he gets picked on and dark forces..oh no. I remember thinking it was going to be scary and nothing in it was good at all. What a piece of garbage. It's as if the filmmakers looked at all the popular movies of the early 80's and tried to rehash it into a sure fire hit. *

I remember watching this on video for my 10th or 11th birthday. That little demented dummy scared the p**s out of us! Now, I was never a horror fan and had never really seen a horror flick before that, so my sense of 'scary/not scary' had yet to be tarnished. So, if you have a 10 year old who isn't into slasher horror flicks, but wants something a little scary, go for it. (We also watched the 80's version of "Invaders from Mars" and thought it was pretty cool--for what it's worth.)