Problem Child (1990)
Directed by Dennis Dugan
Ben Healy and his social climbing wife Flo adopt fun-loving seven year old Junior. But they soon discover he's a little monster as he turns a camping trip, a birthday party and even a baseball game into comic nightmares.
4 connections found
View:
4 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Problem Child to
But few dramas have confronted a parent’s struggles raising a problem child—not including 1990’s “Problem Child,” for obvious reasons.
The kids come off more as Problem Child -style menaces than victims of circumstance, and their tragic back story remains vague enough to keep the movie’s tone light.
Dugan, of course, is the former actor—once the star of The Rockford Files spinoff Richie Brockelman, Private Eye—who cemented a career as a director of tacky, tasteless, lowbrow comedies beginning with Problem Child and including such misfires as Saving Silverman, The Benchwarmers, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and, perhaps most notably, the early Sandler comedies Happy Gilmore and Big Daddy.
Director Dennis Dugan ("Problem Child") does himself proud, however, with his meticulous arrangement of certain scenes; were all the movie as good as the skating-rink first kiss between Happy and Virginia or Happy and Chubbs' nighttime visit to the world's most intoxicating miniature golf course, "Happy Gilmore" would card a 66.
It does in "Happy Gilmore," a formulaic but occasionally funny fish-out-of-water comedy directed by Dennis Dugan ("Problem Child") and starring former Saturday Night Live performer Adam Sandler as the first violence-prone, beer-chugging, obscenity-spouting competitor on the pro golf tour.