Pet Shop (1994)

Posted on Mar 09, 2006 under Comedy, Kidvid, Sci-fi |

Directed by Hope Perello
Written by Mark Goldstein, Greg Suddeth and Brent Friedman
Starring
- Leigh Ann Orsi
- Spencer Vrooman
- Joanne Baron
- David Wagner
- Terry Kiser
Co-produced by Albert Band, Debra Dion, and Peter Von Sholly
Executive produced by Charles Band

After the unexpected popularity of Moonbeam Entertainment’s first offering Prehysteria! (1993), it’s not surprising that in addition to greenlighting the sequel, Charles Band tried to follow that success with another feature (and possible franchise) that mimicked many of the previous film’s elements. Cable-controlled puppet critters by Mark Rappaport? Check. Pubescent protagonists? Check. Light humor buffering any excitement which might be too traumatic for younger viewers? Check. Original idea by Peter Von Sholly? Check. Even the score, by Reg Powell, sounds as if Powell were trying to out-Richard Band Richard Band.

What was really missing to cement Pet Shop’s aspirations was, of course, a big-budget theatrical precedent which would rally the viewing audience to the featured subject matter. Prehysteria! had Jurassic Park (1993), of course, which energized interest in all things dinosaurian (and which accounted for the success of not only the Prehysteria! series, but also Roger Corman’s Carnosaur (1993) and its two-and-a-half sequels). Alas, there was no blockbuster “alien pets” movie in the cineplexes on whose coattails Pet Shop could ride to rental success, and any possible franchise amortizing the cost of the puppets died a-bornin’.

Don’t all endearing family comedies start this way?

Our setting is Cactus Flats, AZ, a small piece of quiet subdivided suburbia full of tame people and even tamer commerce; the one pet store in town is owned by tired old Barney (Alfred Denniss) who keeps forgetting to order a turtle in for eager twelve-year-old Mike (Spencer Vrooman). You can really tell that old Barney’s heart isn’t in it when you see the interior of his store: A cramped retail space with dogs stacked up in travel kennels. So when as mysterious light falls from the sky, and a pair of even more mysterious entrepeneurs (Jeff Michalski and Jane Morris) show up at his back door with a briefcase full of cash, it doesn’t take much coaxing for Barney to sell out and blow town.

But the pet shop’s new owners aren’t the only unusual newcomers to town; the Witness Relocation Program has just relocated East Coast plumber Joe Yeagher (Terry Kiser), his loud wife Marilyn (Joanne Baron), his teen son Charlie (David Wagner) and his sullen pubescent daughter Dena (Leigh Ann Orsi) to Cactus Flats for their own safety. You can just imagine all of the fish-out-of-water gags to be had, and you’d probably better do just that, because the budget doesn’t allow for much interaction between the transplanted family and the locals. The only really salient point to be drawn is that Dena is most upset about having to leave her dog behind with a relative.

By the next day, the new owners of the pet shop have transformed it from a tired little retail tax write-off into a spacious, well-stocked, glitzy pet emporium. Now, you may think I’m letting you in on a secret here, but I’m not: There’s never any question that the new owners are in fact aliens. Calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Zimm, they dress like matching circus cowboys, they speak outdated Western slang garnered from a reference book, they speak to each other in snakelike hisses, and their backroom is decked out in impoverished “outer-spacy” props. They also have four “very special” pets which they brought with them from the stars — the real stars of the feature, if you will, all of whom can transform at will into a terrestrial analog:

I’m kinda glad to know these two are aliens, because otherwise they’d be freaking me out.

- Gizel is a shaggy dog-like thing (the only one realized as a handpuppet rather than a cable puppet), which can transform into a puppy.

- Trimble is carapaced reptile which can become a turtle.

- Pwing (I think that’s what they said — it’s not as if the names are listed in the closing credits) is a more slender reptile with wall-walking abilities which turns into a lizard.

- Foobub is a trademark infringement on a Furby, which transforms into a baby rabbit.

Gee, with four alien pets, there must be four potential human owners, right? So there’s Dena, pining away for a puppy; there’s Mike, awaiting his turtle (and also trying to get friendly with the new girl); there’s Nicky (Cody Burger), Mike’s fat friend who walks around with a Walkman surgically attached to his skull; and there’s Alexis (Sabrina Wiener), their annoying fashion-obsessed classmate who makes her own clothes (and looks as if she’s auditioning for Young Miss Bag Lady of Cactus Flats).

The aliens’ nefarious (cough) scheme is accomplished thusly: They monitor the kids via hidden cameras to see what they’re partial to; the find ‘em in the store and offer to give them a “special” pet for free if they come back later; when the kids show up after hours, the Zimms send them home with one of the alien pets in earthly guise — but without the pets’ essential vitamins. Ha ha!

Wait. That’s a nefarious plan?

And here’s a shot for the ladies!

The kids each take their pet home, playing with them until the moment when their true natures are accidentally revealed. Wow, cool, alien cable-controlled pet! But when the pets each start acting lethargic, the kids get together and try to figure out what’s the matter. Could it be their food? (Cue the cutesy “making a mess of the kitchen” montage!) Eventually, the kids realize that the contracts they signed when they got their pets state that they can take their pets back to the pet shop if there’s anything wrong with them. So they all troop back…

Look, I don’t demand that every pernicious alien plot be a model of efficiency and good time management, but this one’s a real waste of resources. The Zimms, you see, are interstellar pet dealers — and humans are very much in demand as pets out there among the stars. But one of the rules of international trade is that you can only take as many creatures from a planet as you leave behind (obviously not a law created by a governing body concerned with conservation of pristine biospheres). So the Zimms plan to take the four human children with them for their clients, leaving the four alien pets behind.

Which raises questions whose only possible answer is, “Well, we needed this thing to run a full eighty-seven minutes.” Questions like, Why didn’t they just nab the children when they came back to the store one by one to get their promised pets, instead of letting them bond with their semi-intelligent alien pets and then come back all together, in a body great enough to cause trouble for the not-terribly-competent Zimms? Why bother with this whole “contract” notion (which leads absolutely nowhere), or this vitamin deficiency angle, if neither was going to contribute anything more than maybe bringing the kids back to the shop (and not on a schedule that the Zimms could dictate as easily as when the kids first came for their pets)? Too call the mechanics of their scheme “Rube-Goldbergian” is an insult to the respectable Mr. Goldberg; it seems more like an operating procedure drafted by four separate committees of civil servants.

**Tonight’s secret incredient on The Iron Chef…**

Now if the plot I’ve described seems far too thin to sustain for a full eighty-seven minutes, you’re right. The movie is full of threads that I’ve come to refer to as “Benjamin Carrisms,” named after one of the great practitioners of the form: The kind of subplots, motifs, and semi-clever little curliques with which writers dress up a weak and non-negotiable plotline, both to fill time and to keep themselves amused.

Thus, we get twin muscled-bound mob enforcers (Nino and Leonardo Vincent Surdo) charged with inflicting mob justice on the Yeagher family, except they barely know where Arizona is, and they run out of gas in the desert, and they squabble to fill time, until they arrive in Cactus Flats and try unsuccessfully to blend.

Then there’s also the subplot about Mike setting Dena’s older brother Charlie up with his own older sister, mostly so Charlie will drive Dena over to Mike’s place with her pet. Thing is, Mike’s sister is “fat.” Except, she’s only “fat” by Hollywood standards; sure, she’s plenty zoftig when we first see her coming out of a pool in a bikini, but all that does is move the line for body image acceptance even further for all of the women trying to maintain a healthy physique outside of supermodel starvation camps.

**“Excuse me? Do i look dead?”**

And, with the most disappointing potential-to-execution ratio, is an idea only barely hinted at in one scene and then complete forgotten: That Cactus Flats is such a favorite spot for the Witness Relocation Program that the whole town is actually overrun with snitches in hiding. Both this and the “sign the contract on the dotted line” idea seem like they were originally meant to be much larger parts of the story in earlier treatments, but got watered out during the development process — except that the writers couldn’t bear to jettison them entirely, and thus left only the briefest glimpse of something that could have been in the movie but wasn’t.

In the end, everything gets resolved happily, but without finesse; the kids and their pets turn the tables on the Zimms, and when the mob enforcers show up in the crossfire, the Zimms decide just to cut their losses and abscond through their transporter back to their home planet with the twin beefcakes instead. Dena discovers, in a stunning moment of screenwriter apathy, that the dirt around Cactus Flats contains exactly the vitamin compound the alien pets need, and everyone’s set to live happily forever’n'ever’n'ever. Except Charlie, who’s still being chased around by Mike’s pseudo-fat sister.

What’s most disappointing here is that, unlike the Prehysteria! movies, there were some good ideas (or at least interesting ones) introduced into the storycrafting process at some point, apart from the central gimmick of the critters. Unfortunately, the best of the ideas were never brought to fruition, and instead died like kittens in a gunny sack, drowned amidst the unremarkable filler that takes up most of the movie.

Extra Tidbit: By some stroke of fate, just as I was writing this review, I found a movie prop broker on eBay who was auctioning off a couple of old Mark Rappaport cable puppets from movies he couldn’t identify. It took no more than a glance for me to peg them as being Trimble…