Gooby

2009 children's horror film/possible sequel to The Shining

Rating: 5/20 (Emma: 2/20; Abbey: 1/20)

Plot: Poor little Willy's got no friends, his parents don't really pay attention to him, and to make his life even more miserable, his family is moving to a new place. And he's seeing monsters. Luckily, his childhood stuffed toy comes to life and septuples in size to hang out with him.

Biggest laugh I've had in a while: When looking up information for this movie, I saw it described on several websites as being about a boy and the bear from The Shining. And Gooby does like like the man in a bear suit in my favorite scene in The Shining which might make this the greatest movie of all time. Then again, it might represent the main problem with Gooby as a children's movie--that it's terrifying. Unless you happen to think that the main problem is that the name of the movie is Gooby. It's one of those titles I can't imagine people wanting to ask about for at a ticket window. "Two tickets to, umm, Gooby please?" I thought for sure there'd be a twist ending where it's revealed that Willy is schizophrenic. I assumed this was like an after-school special about mental illness. It's really the only way this could have made any sense at all. I figured the whole time that he would be the only person to ever see Gooby, but it didn't turn out to be that way at all. Toward the beginning of the story, he does see a CGI monster thing, the reason Gooby shows up in the first place, I think. But the man-in-a-suit Gooby and th CGI monster never interact, so I'm not real sure why that CGI monster was in this thing at all. Maybe they intended to have Gooby do battle with the CGI monster but realized that a CGI monster and a guy in a suit would look ridiculous. I couldn't believe it when I saw that this movie came out in 2009, probably because it's got the sentimentality of an 80's kiddie flick and everything it rips off comes from that era. The story's dopey, the dialogue is embarrassingly awful, and the way this plot develops would make even the men with the most cinematic intestinal fortitude lose their cookies. Gooby, by the way, eats a lot of cookies in this, sort of like E.T. with the Reese's Pieces minus the distasteful product placement. That would put Gooby a notch above E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, but at least there's not a scene in the latter where E.T. farts and then starts fanning his crotch to waft the smell in Elliot's direction. Gooby does that because that's the type of friend Gooby is. And that's the type of movie Gooby is.

And for your amusement, here's a picture of the bear from The Shining (best scene in that movie, by the way) and a picture of Gooby from Gooby (there is no best scene in that movie, by the way):