Problem Child (film)



Problem Child is a 1990 American comedy film directed by Dennis Dugan and produced by Robert Simonds. The film stars John Ritter, Amy Yasbeck, Gilbert Gottfried, Jack Warden, Michael Richards, and Michael Oliver.

Plot
Ben Healy (John Ritter) is a pleasant but brow-beaten yuppie working for his father "Big Ben" (Jack Warden), a tyrannical sporting goods dealer. Ben would love to have a son, but his obnoxious wife Flo (Amy Yasbeck) has been unable to conceive. Ben approaches less-than-scrupulous adoption agent Igor Peabody (Gilbert Gottfried) with his dilemma, and Igor presents Ben and Flo with a cute 7-year-old boy, Junior (Michael Oliver).

However, Junior is hardly a model child; mean-spirited and incorrigible, the child leaves a path of serious destruction in his wake, and is even pen pals with Martin Beck (Michael Richards), a notorious serial killer. The cat ends up in the hospital, Big Ben ends up falling down the stairs, and the house catches on fire. He messes up a camping trip with the neighbors by urinating in the fire, and manipulating a practical joke played on the kids by their father. He then terrorizes his neighbor's birthday party, after Lucy, the snobby birthday girl, bans him from the magic show. Finally, Junior displays his effective but unethical method for winning in Little League (involves hitting rival players in the crotch with a baseball bat). Ben is having serious doubts about Junior, and takes him back to the orphanage. However, upon hearing he was returned thirty times, he decides to keep him and love him, something no one has ever done. However, distraught that his parents do not love him, Junior drives Ben's car into his father's store, and his bank account is wiped out to pay for the damages. Ben is on the verge of cracking until Beck arrives at the house, and decides to kidnap his faithful correspondent, along with Flo.

While Ben first sees this as good riddance to his browbeating wife and the trouble making Junior, he soon notices signs that Junior is not the monster he appeared; through a series of pictures Junior drew, he depicts children and adults who treated him poorly as deformed monsters with hostile surroundings, but depicted Ben as a person in a pleasant background, revealing that he did value him as a father figure. Ben, realizing that Junior's behavior was simply a reaction to how he himself was treated, undertakes a rescue mission to get Junior back from Beck.

Now exerting a more assertive attitude, Ben first steals his neighbor's car and hat (and drives it all over their yard). He also confronts his father for money. When he is rudely dismissed, Ben pushes a button that puts Big Ben unknowingly on camera, where he ends up revealing his true nature on the news, even mooning the camera.

Ben catches up with Beck and Junior at the circus. Junior is rescued after escaping from Beck through a trapeze act. Beck drives away, but the Healys are now on his tail. After a collision, Flo (who was stuffed in a suitcase), flies over the wall, and ends up in the back of a truck loaded with pigs. Beck is arrested, but not before getting a shot off, which hits Ben in the chest. Thinking he has died, Junior apologizes and tells him he loves him. Ben wakes up and realizes the bullet ricocheted off his good-luck prune he was holding in his pocket. Junior then removes his bow tie and throws it over the bridge, as a symbol perhaps that he has changed his ways, and then walks away together with his new father.

Cast

 * John Ritter as Benjamin 'Ben' Healy, Jr.
 * Michael Oliver as Junior
 * Jack Warden as Benjamin 'Big Ben' Healy, Sr., Ben's wealthy but selfish father
 * Gilbert Gottfried as Igor Peabody, the adoption agent at the orphanage
 * Amy Yasbeck as Flo Healy, Ben's wife
 * Michael Richards as Martin Beck, an escaped convict who goes by the moniker "The Bow Tie Killer"
 * Peter Jurasik as Roy, Ben and Flo's neighbor
 * Colby Kline as Lucy, a selfish, mean, and spoiled 6-year-old
 * Dennis Dugan (cameo) as All American Dad

Production
The film was shot on location in the state of Texas, from October to November 1989. The cities that were used for filming were Dallas, Farmers Branch, Fort Worth, Irving, and Mesquite.

During a 2014 interview on Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski revealed that the story was inspired by the 1988 Los Angeles Times article "An Adopted Boy--and Terror Begins" about a married couple suing an adoption agency after they were not informed that their adopted son had severe mental health issues with violent tendencies and had been previously returned to the agency multiple times. While other writers pitched the story as a horror film in the vein of Bad Seed or The Omen, Alexander and Karaszewski thought it had potential as a comedy, envisioning a dark, adult satire of the then-popular trend in films where cute kids teach cynical adults how to love, as seen in Baby Boom, Parenthood (directly spoofed by the film's poster), Look Who's Talking, Uncle Buck, Mr. Mom, Kindergarten Cop and 3 Men and a Baby. However, the studio insisted upon turning it into a children's film, a conversion which necessitated numerous reshoots and rewrites, leading to a difficult production that left all involved disappointed and anticipating it to bomb. The film defied these expectations, becoming a surprise hit and Universal's most profitable film of 1990 but was still so embarrassing for Alexander and Karaszewski (Alexander even cried after the cast and crew screening) that the two tried to distance themselves from the film, which proved difficult. Studios were initially reluctant to hire them or take them seriously based on their work on such a prominent disreputable film but, as the years went by, they would eventually come to work with executives who were children when it first came out, grew up watching its frequent TV airings and were excited to be meeting its writers. Looking back, they still feel it is "a mess," but take some pride in being involved with one of the "very few [PG-rated] children's films THAT black and THAT crazy" (citing the scene where Flo commits adultery with an escaped serial killer while her husband is catatonic and contemplating murdering his seven-year-old son in the next room as an example) adding "and it's funny."

On 2015, director Dennis Dugan revealed he was hired for the movie, his first theatrical release after a decade of television directing, once in his audition for Universal, he jumped on the executives' coffee table and said "You're looking at me like I'm fucking nuts, and this is what we want. We want this kind of chaos." Dugan suggested John Ritter, with whom he had worked in his actor career, for the role of Ben Healy. The studio was initially reluctant, feeling they needed a more famous actor, but eventually relented. For the role of "Big Ben" Healy, Jack Warden first refused the role, and then Dugan offered half his net points. Warden was so touched he accepted the work while not taking Dugan's payments. Amy Yasbeck was cast as Ritter's wife, and both fell in love during production, eventually marrying in 1999. During production, both Ritter and Gilbert Gottfried were allowed to ad lib, making Universal complain at Dugan for shooting too much footage for Gottfried's scenes. The first test screening was disastrous, with 70 percent of the audience walking out, verbal complaints from viewers, and a score of only 30. The studio forced two weeks of reshoots, including a retooled ending and the addition of key scenes like the girl's birthday party.

Box office
The film debuted at third place. It went on to be a commercial success at the box office, grossing $54 million domestically and $72 million worldwide.

Critical reception
The film received widely negative reviews upon its release. On the film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, it received a critics' rating of 4% based on 28 reviews, and an audience rating of 41%. The critic consensus reads: "Mean-spirited and hopelessly short on comic invention, Problem Child is a particularly unpleasant comedy, one that's loaded with manic scenery chewing and juvenile pranks".'' On Metacritic, the film has a 27/100 rating based on 12 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".

Although the film was rated PG, it is still heavily censored when shown on television due to the remarks made about adoption, which critics saw as insensitive. Problem Child was not screened for critics prior to its release. Surprisingly, it managed to acquire a PG rating instead of a PG-13 rating, in regards to a scene where you briefly see backside nudity (a man mooning a camera), not to mention another scene that briefly reveals snapshots Junior took of people on toilets and in showers.

Hal Hinson, writing for The Washington Post, noted "Dugan has a brisk, imaginative comic style; he sets up his gags well, so that there's still some surprise in the punch lines when they come. Essentially, the problem here is the same as the problem in Gremlins 2. It's basically about tearing stuff up, and after a while you grow tired of seeing variations on the same joke of a cute kid committing horrible atrocities."

Protests over posters
One of the posters for the film showed a cat in a tumble dryer, with the implication being that Junior had put it inside. A group named In Defence Of Animals organised protests against the posters, and some cinemas took them down in response. The group also objected to a scene in the film in which Junior splinters a cat's legs.

Accolades
For the film (as well as The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Look Who's Talking Too), Gilbert Gottfried was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Donald Trump in Ghosts Can't Do It.

Home media
The film was more successful on home video. The VHS version adds an extra bit just before the closing credits, in which Junior interrupts the film, to tell the audience that he'll be back next summer for Problem Child 2. Then he disappears and a loud flatulent noise is heard, followed by Ben shouting "Junior!", him laughing, then the closing credits roll. The VHS version was released on January 31, 1991.

The first DVD release was released by GoodTimes Entertainment on May 1, 2001. Problem Child and Problem Child 2 were released together on DVD in the US on March 2, 2004, as a package entitled Problem Child Tantrum Pack. These films were presented in open-matte full screen only. However, no home video release thus far features the deleted footage shown on TV airings of the film.

The film was re-released on the Family Comedy Pack Quadruple Feature DVD (with other comedy films like Kindergarten Cop, Kicking & Screaming, and Major Payne) in anamorphic widescreen (being the film's first widescreen Region 1 DVD release) on August 5, 2008.

Sequels
The film inspired two sequels: the first, Problem Child 2, was released theatrically in 1991; the second, Problem Child 3: Junior in Love, was a television film aired on the NBC in 1995. The first one brought back the original cast in their original roles and picked up where the first film ended. However, Yasbeck was given a new role with a new dynamic totally opposite to her original character. In the third and final film, recast Ben and Junior with William Katt and Justin Chapman, while Gottfried and Warden reprised their roles as Mr. Peabody and Big Ben and does not follow the storyline of the first two films.

Television series
There was an animated TV series that aired in 1993. Gottfried was the only original cast member to be featured as a voice-over actor, making him the only cast member involved in all three films as well as the cartoon (Warden was in all three films, but not the TV series).

NBC has ordered a pilot for a live-action TV series based on the film, produced by STX Entertainment, Imagine TV, and NBCUniversal.

Television version
Twelve minutes worth of deleted footage were featured in most, if not all, television airings of the film. None of the following scenes have ever been available on DVD. The first TV version aired on September 15, 1991, on NBC-TV. The profanity in it was re-dubbed with milder obscenities and phrases.