by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Caballé recital we moved, as Charles joked, from
the sublime to the ridiculous: a 1991 comedy called Drop Dead Fred which received legendarily bad reviews (Gene Siskel
called it the worst movie of its year) even though it didn’t do all that badly at the box office (it made $43,878,334 on an
estimated production cost of $6,788,000), and according to Charles — who’d seen
it at the time — it pretty much killed the potentially hot careers of two of
its male leads, Rik Mayall and Ron Eldard. The gimmick is that Drop Dead Fred
(Rik Mayall) was the imaginary friend created by eight-year-old Elizabeth
“Lizzie” Cronin (Ashley Peldon) to provide an outlet for the traumas she went
through being raised by her dragon-lady mother Polly (Marsha Mason in a
performance that steals the movie). The opening shows Polly reading the story
of Cinderella to her daughter, who asks how mom knows Cinderella and the Prince lives happily ever after.
“Because, she was a good little girl,” mom replies. “If she would have been
naughty, the Prince would have run away.” “What a pile of shit,” Lizzie fires
back — an expletive which pretty much sets the tone for the entire movie. We
then get a title that reads, “21 Years Later,” and 21 years later Lizzie is
played by the film’s star, Phoebe Cates. She’s having the Mother of All Bad
Days: first her husband Charles (a marvelously slimy performance by the
unexpectedly handsome, especially given what he looked like in his other roles,
Tim Matheson) announces he’s leaving her for another woman named Annabelle;
then, as she parks her car to make a call at a pay phone (which itself dates
this movie!) a guy reaches through the open window of her car and steals her
purse. Then another guy gets into
her car and drives off with it. Lizzie makes it to her job as a court reporter
but she’s so discombobulated by the events of her day so far she can’t
concentrate on her work and the judge calls her to his bench and fires her on
the spot. On her way out the door the one good thing that happens to her all
day arrives in the form of Mickey Bunce (Ron Eldard), who was a playmate of
hers when they were both kids before he moved away. When Lizzie returns to the
apartment she was sharing with Charles, mother shows up and insists that she
move in with her — which she does.
Once she’s back at mom’s home Drop Dead Fred,
her childhood imaginary friend, returns — only he’s not totally imaginary. He’s
much like the ghosts in a lot of filmed ghost stories: though Lizzie is the
only one that can see him, he can
manipulate physical objects and destroy things — for which Lizzie is, of
course, blamed. Drop Dead Fred’s first act when he invades the Cronin home is
to cover his feet with dog poop and get it all over Polly’s pristine, newly
shampooed white carpet as well as her white furniture. That pretty much sets
the tone for the whole movie, which could have been great fun if only Drop Dead
Fred weren’t so relentlessly obnoxious and destructive. At one point, Lizzie
gets away from mom by becoming the house guest of her friend Janie (Carrie
Fisher in a nice small role) on her paddle-wheeled houseboat, only Fred takes
over the controls and, pretending to be a pirate, ends up sinking the
houseboat. Then Mickey actually gets Lizzie to go on a lunch date with him at
an Italian restaurant — only Fred screws that up for her by throwing food off her table at the
other customers, and Mickey gets into the groove by throwing food himself and
gets them both thrown out. In the end Fred arranges for Lizzie to crash
Charles’ wine-tasting party, where she directly confronts Annabelle (Bridget Fonda,
who apparently took the role as a favor to her friend Phoebe Cates) and manages
at least briefly to seduce Charles back — only she catches him making a secret
phone call to Annabelle; obviously Charles wants his wife and his mistress too.
Finally there’s an odd fantasy sequence in which Drop Dead Fred departs
Lizzie’s life and she hooks up with Mickey, who had just gone through a divorce
and has custody of his own eight-year-old daughter — although Drop Dead Fred
reappears in Lizzie’s life by becoming the imaginary friend of Mickey’s
daughter and covering her in chocolate, which Mickey finds repulsive even
though he should be relieved that it is chocolate, not mud or dog shit.
Drop Dead Fred could have been a deeper, richer movie if one of the
two actors who was obviously “right” for the role of Fred, Robin Williams and
Jim Carrey, had played him (according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, Williams
was actually offered the role but turned it down to play the grown-up and
boring Peter Pan in Steven Spielberg’s Hook); instead Rik Mayall portrays the character as so
relentlessly obnoxious one feels sorry for Lizzie that her imagination couldn’t
conjure up a nicer and more
genuinely helpful make-believe friend instead. Oh, and did I mention that at
one point Polly takes her daughter Lizzie to a psychiatrist who specializes in
relieving kids of their make-believe friends — or that the coming-together of
Drop Dead Fred with the other kids’ imaginary friends is actually one of the
funniest and most charming parts of the film? I can see why Drop Dead
Fred got the derisive reviews it did and
why a number of distributors passed on it before Roger Corman’s New Line Cinema
took it on, but as it stands it’s an uneven movie with moments of genuine wit
and humor mixed in with appalling bits of gross-out “comedy” (one of Fred’s
nastier habits is picking his nose and depositing the residue on other people),
and one feels sorry for the director, Ate de Jong (which sounds like something
on a Chinese menu!), trying to get a coherent film out of a committee-written
script (Elizabeth Livingston, story; Carlos Davis and Anthony Fingleton,
screenplay) that veers off in too many directions and also involves Fred in way too many awful, destructive deeds to make him the
tragicomic figure he could have been in better surer hands both in front of and
behind the camera.
