Review of The Wizard (1989) by Joseph K — 22 Apr 2013

I love this movie. I love how it's an obvious marketing ploy from Nintendo, and yet it seems to have been made by people who know about as much about video games as I know about giving birth to an ostrich. I love that every one of Christian Slater's lines in this movie is an anti-joke. I love that kids talk like film noir detectives. I love that it seems to take place in a strange parallel world where the adults act like kids, and the kids act like adults, but their roles in life remain the same. I love that the director's vision of middle-class Americans amounts to them driving around with a tree in their truck for no god damn reason. I love how it truly captures some of those painfully, uncomfortably, s***y moments in life with remarkable success, even though there's no god damn reason why any movie would ever want to do that. I love how aggressively abrupt the romance starts, and how aggressively abrupt it stops. I love how Fred Savage's performance seems like Frank Sinatra by way of Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I love how needlessly convoluted the family tree of the lead characters is. I love how the competition announcer near the end acts like Jim Carrey if he were a Russian pedophile. I love how over-explained, overthought, and over-foreshadowed the surprise ending is, even though it is startlingly anticlimactic and has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

Now I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "well golly jeepers Michael, this film seems like it's no darn good at all!" And you would be correct my 1950s sitcom friend! It is not! And herein lies the reason why I love it so much.

This is not a good movie, no matter which way you look at it. It's cheap, it's exploitative, it's bizarrely paced, and a good portion of it just doesn't make any godamn sense. But you know what? That's kind of what makes it so awesome. It so completely misses its target in such a spectacularly bizarre manner, that it almost begins to feel like the whole thing was intentional all along, like they actually meant to put all these weird ingredients together to make a movie so bad that it makes some sort of quantum leap into being good. What The Room is to dramas, what Troll 2 is to horror, what Rocky Horror Picture Show is to musicals, The Wizard is to family comedies. And that is pretty much the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of ever.

On merits of quality, it gets a 3.5. On enjoyment though, it's a 5.