Leave It to Beaver (1997)
Directed by Andy Cadiff
The Cleavers are an all-American family living in Ohio – wise father Ward, loving mother June, teenage son Wally, and 8-year-old Theodore, better known as 'Beaver'. Beaver hopes to get a bike as a gift from his father and to please him tries out for his school football team and he makes it, only to be embarrassed. The bike he gets is quickly stolen. Meanwhile, Wally is trying to help his friend Eddie Haskell to get the heart of pretty classmate Karen, but Karen seems to like Wally more, and that leads to tensions between the friends.
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What critics compared Leave It to Beaver to
Anyway, that’s the closest the film gets to any pathos—when they bury Six at sea, Reynolds starts talking about Leave It to Beaver and makes lots of silly jokes, which kills the vibe quicker than Franco was impaled.
Despite a running “Leave It to Beaver” joke, they are not a family, One insists, but an elite group of “ghosts” — super-skilled, ultra-lethal experts in their respective fields who’ve faked their deaths in order to “haunt the living for what they’ve done.”
But just as it almost loses you with the vibes of a present-day Leave It to Beaver, the proverbial crud hits the fan as we quickly find out Hutch isn't close to the quiet suburban dad we were led to believe.
In many ways, Sammy’s life looks like a Leave It to Beaver –esque paradise.
We’re shown Sammy’s “Leave It to Beaver”–esque progression from filmmaking otter pup to teen wunderkind (teen Sammy is played by Gabriel LaBelle).
The overly Leave It To Beaver dialogue he and his daughter exchange prior to assuming their crime-fighting alter egos is charmingly silly and if you don’t get a kick out of his channeling of Adam West from the 60’s Batman series when he is in the suit I highly suggest a humor implant immediately.
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We all need a little bit of “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Brady Bunch” in our lives.
The place is overseen by the hawkish General Hoyt (Searcy) and his head of security, Richard Strickland (Shannon), an all-American cold warrior with a home life straight out of Leave It to Beaver, if the Beav’s pop had been a stern-eyed zealot with zero tolerance for human error.
At the start of the scene, the boy (Ty Simpkins) is wearing Leave It to Beaver -style striped pajamas and drinking a wholesome glass of milk.
The effect is like watching a “Leave It to Beaver” where Eddie Haskell gets his head blown off.
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Despite a few Rosemary’s Baby influences (Mia being named after actress Mia Farrow?) and two stand-out scenes oozing prime nightmare fuel, Annabelle is mostly a period melodrama that plays like a cheesy Leave It To Beaver episode where the Manson family guest stars.
They are inventions of course — no parent could be this clueless, always emphasizing the wrong thing and delivering reprimands that wouldn’t pass muster on “Leave It to Beaver.”