Joey

I remember watching this film at a young age and found the movie terrifying. It was my first doll/dummy movie and from then on I definitely needed a night light. The dummy creeps me out even to this day. For the longest time I would have reoccurring dreams of the doll. I could not have a closet open because I thought the dummy would be in there, just staring at me. Even when I had stuffed animals or toys in my closet I felt like they were staring at me.

As I grew older, I laugh at the Chucky doll and never found him all that creepy, but the dummy from Joey definitely still gives me the creeps. I even recently watched the film 'Magic' and found that just as creepy. The doll from Dead Silence is the next big scary thing for me now. I just hope they keep coming with these.

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.)

Set in Virginia Beach, 9-year-old Joey Collins (Joshua Morrell) and his mother Laura (Eva Kryll) are morning the loss of Joey's father. One night unexplained phenomena start happening when many of Joey's toys start moving and turning on by themselves including a toy telephone that Joey comes to believe allows him to speak to his deceased father. Other kids at school including bully Bernie (Matthias Kraus) mock Joey for this, and both Laura and Joey's Teacher Martin (Jan Zierold) show concern which is only exacerbated by Joey displaying telekinetic abilities. As time goes on, a malevolent entity in the form of a ventriloquist Dummy (Jack Angel) begins confronting Joey and threatens Joey's mother if he keeps using the toy phone which the Dummy claims isn't his father on the other end.

Joey (retitled Making Contact for the Roger Corman release) is the second film from director Roland Emmerich. After having seen and been impressed with Steven Spielberg's E. T. in 1982, Emmerich decided his next film would be a horror film that incorporated many of the techniques seen in 80s American blockbusters of the Spielbergian mold. Despite being a German production, the film was shot in English as Emmerich wanted to target an international audience after his first film The Noah's Ark Principle hadn't been a big success at the German box office. Emmerich recruited most of the actors from U. S. military bases in Germany, and used his contacts to friends in the United States, who helped him with suggestions and props, to create the American look of the film. The effects work in Joey was done by Hubert Bartholomae, with whom Emmerich had collaborated on The Noah's Ark Principle, who had to build up a new studio to experiment with different ways of creating the effects needed for the film. For a low budget production of 3.5 million Deutsch Marks, Roland Emmerich certainly captures the look and feel of 80s Spielberg productions except for the script which is a confusing hodgepodge of ideas that aren't fully formed.

In terms of the effects work and look of the film, Emmerich certainly has created a film that encompasses everything you remember about that whimsical 80s Spielbergian style of filmmaking seen in Close Encounters, E. T. and its various contemporaries. The cast not being made of professional actors (and you can certainly tell from some of them) does make it difficult to be sucked into this film storywise, but even good actors would have a hard time selling the material here. According to Roland Emmerich's Biography by Jo Muller, Emmerich wasn't all that concerned with the actual story in the film so much as the look and effects work (and you can tell). While on a purely visual level there's a lot to appreciate in the film, the movie doesn't have any real substance to it and is just a loose assortment of ideas crudely daisy chained into a narrative. Despite Emmerich allegedly being inspired by E. T., Joey plays more like a weird mixture of Poltergeist, Carrie, and the Anthony Hopkins horror film Magic. The actual "why" as to what's happening is never established and despite the Dummy routinely saying the thing on the other side of the phone isn't Joey's father we're never given any idea as to what it is on the other side of the phone and the Dummy keeps acting stereotypically evil and cackling so there's no clear motivation for what's going on. The adult characters also take what's going on a little too well to the point that this feels like someone made a Zucker Abrahams Zucker type parody of Spielbergian blockbusters in the vein of Airplane! Or Top Secret but for some reason cut out all the jokes and played it straight.

I guess in terms of weird 80s timecapsules of these kinds of filmmaking tropes, there is a certain novelty to seeing them portrayed in a funhouse mirror image of themselves by way of Emmerich's complete lack of subtlety (complete with some stuff that would be a copyright nightmare with all the Star Wars, Disney, and other licensed merch that adorns the sets). But the story's such an unfocused mess portrayed by inexperienced actors that it does become a bit of a slog to sit through.

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.