Review of Mikey (2003) by Joseph A. S — 30 Sep 2014

"Mikey" (1992) is one of these painful thrillers where a young innocent kid with a caring family turns evil! This was considered to be the "The Bad Seed" of the 90s, not a good one at that and it even has a laughable tagline: "Freddy and Jason were kids once too!" Yeah, and so was Michael Myers! Brian Bonsall plays an 10-year old kid named Mikey Holt who lives with his foster parents and their 5-year old daughter, Beth. Here's where the film gets really hard to sit through! At the beginning of the film, he started lighting papers on fire in the garage with Beth until he was caught by his mother, Grace Kelven and yelled at him. As for revenge, he took Beth's doll, she chases him and threw it in the swimming pool. Beth tries to catch it while on the diving board with Mikey jumping around until she felt in and drowned. Then, Mikey went to his mother in the bathtub, dumped an electric hot dryer and said "you don't love me anymore", while been electrocuted and killed. After that, his father arrives and you wouldn't believe this, he slips from the silver marbles, crashing into a glass door window and Mikey smacked him in the head violently with a Baseball bat.

Soon the police includes Detective Reynolds and a social worker, Katherine arrives on the scene and found Mikey hiding in the closet, thinking that a man came in and killed his parents. Give me a break! 8 minutes into the film and I was ready to punch a hole on the screen! But I didn't! So I continue with more when Mikey was at the Doctor's office, lying to the doctor about man in the house. Grace's sister, Casey didn't want to adopt him (can you blame her after what happened to her sister!) so he wounds up moving with another adoptive parents named Rachel and Neil Trenton. Things were going out well with Mikey's new family, he has a friend named Ben, goes to a new school with a teacher, Shawn and Neil teaches him with archery, who's very natural with a bow and arrow, he even draws a picture of a swimming pool as a symbolic of being good. Mikey was a good kid for a while until the "marble" incident at school where he wants to win a prize and couldn't! That's where things starting to get even ugly when he drew a picture of a turkey chopping of a pilgrim's head with an axe, as Shawn announced to Jenkins that he has "Unattached Syndrome", a psychotic problem which makes the child more evil than ever. So now, Mikey has taken the matter of his own hands as he goes on a series of killing activities. He kills Ben's older sister, Jessie's cat, Rosie after videotaping her with her boyfriend David, being upset with jealously because he loves Jessie so much and thinking it was David's fault for accidentally ran over her cat by his truck, dumping an electric Radio on the jacuzzi and electrocuted David. A few days later, Shawn talks to Detective Reynolds on the phone about Mikey's case and sees the police reports on Mikey's murdered adoptive parents since the Oklahoma City Police have unsolved evidence and closed the case. Later, he faxed over a copy at school that morning, Jenkins got a call and is told by Neil that Mikey and Ben won't be at school today due to the "accident" at Ben's house. Oh, and here's more as the many scenes followed, he kills Rachel by pushing her at the balcony, shoots an arrow at Jenkins and oh my god, he even slingshots a marble slowing up on Shawn's face, shooting up blood anywhere and drags their bodies into the dining room with a child skeleton and turns on the oven and once Neil comes home with a Surprise, he saw them on the dinner table, he screams and Mikey throws a flaming bottle in the house and explodes leaving Neil dead with them. As the police and fire department arrives, a local fireman questions Ben, Jessie and their mother about what happened in there and mentions about a 10 year-old kid there. They wondered if Mikey was dead.

So a couple of a days later, we found out that Mikey is suffering from amnesia and was named "Josh" and ends with another foster parents in a typical here-we-go-again cliche, saying "Are you gonna be my new mommy and daddy?".

This is without a doubt the worst child killer movie I've ever seen and I saw "The Good Son", which is way worse and even many followers like "Orphan". No wonder it was banned in the UK, no one wants to see a child killing somebody. The film was shot like a bad TV Movie of the Week and it shows, filled with cookie cutter dialogue, bad acting, ridiculous and pointless scenes, poorly edited, and a wasted talent of Brian Bonsall, who was so good in "Family Ties", did enjoying him later in "Blank Check" (I know not many people like this film, but it was certainly better than this!). He was a great child actor that sadly deserves so much better than this dreaded material! BTW, I met him once in 1991 with my brother Jason in L.A. during the "Dance Outreach" program supported from my elementary school. He sure was cute as a button back then though. Now as an adult, he fallen through hard times. I wonder how he really felt after making this movie, I'm sure I wouldn't know. The film was directed by Dennis Dimster, an actor and director who did TV appearances and later directed "Wicked, Wicked Games" and "Double Identity" (2009) with Val Kilmer. This must have been his earlier project that simply have gone to waste! It was a direct-to-video release in the U.S. on September 23, 1992 and saw it at very young age. And, to this day, it's still horrible! Don't waste 90 minutes of your time, watch something better!