• Directed by Ted Nicolaou
• Written by Mike Farrow
• Starring
  • Chris Carrara
  • Jessica Bowman
  • John Diehl
  • Derya Ruggles
  • Tony Longo
• Produced by Albert Band
• Executive produced by Charles Band

Although Remote is not particularly memorable as a movie, it does mark the far boundaries of the Full Moon canon in terms of content. There are no sci-fi or fantasy elements to the story (and certainly no horror, coming as it does under the Moonbeam Entertainment label of kid-friendly features); it’s instead a straight Home Alone ripoff with more of an eye toward gadgetry as a gimmick.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t follow formula to the extent that a drinking game is almost obligatory. Our protagonist, thirteen-year-old Randy (Chris Carrara), is an intelligent but awkward junior high student (drink!) with a consuming hobby (drink!) — remote-controlled airplanes, cars, etc. Oddly enough for this genre, he is not the product of a single parent home, which means that we don’t have to hear some damned version of the “I wish Mom/Dad were still here” expository line, but his father is off on a business trip and his mother (Derya Ruggles) has a demanding white-collar job, which means that only-child Randy is left to his own devices much of the time (drink). He has an African-American best friend Jamaal (Kenneth A. Brown) who speaks a respectable suburban version of jive (drink!); a cute galpal, Judy (Jessica Bowman), with whom his relationship might be on the cusp of moving from platonic to more glandular (drink!); and a bully, Ben (Jordan Belfi), who goes out of his way to torment Randy (drain the bottle!).

These are the bad kids at a Los Angeles junior high? In what universe?

Randy and Jenny also have a secret hideout, a model home in a half-built subdivision. The dormer vent into the attic isn’t nailed in, so they prop up a ladder and enjoy their own little sanctuary from the world, and it’s pretty clear that we’re supposed to think they’ve snuck away for a little Boy Scout/Girl Scout experimentation before they break out the R/C cars and planes. Compounding that impression is a double entendre about “almost losing control” of their toys, though that’s undercut by Jessica Bowman’’s uniformly lackluster delivery. (Bowman afterward went on to play three seasons on Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman, a TV show I never watched; I can only assume she got better.)

Through a contorted series of events that involves Randy using his R/C skills to mess with Ben’s TV remote (how bright is it to actively tick off a bully who lives right across the street?), Ben’s retaliation on one of Randy’s planes, and a showdown of R/C controllers that culminates in a fireball in science class, Randy ends up expelled, with his mom threatening to take away every one of his radio-controlled toys. So Randy enlists Judy’s help to transport the whole lot of them to the attic in the model house.

“I guess maybe we shouldn’t have skipped that maturation assembly…”

It’s while Randy’s sitting there alone, feeling sorry for himself, the other half of the plot arrives in the form of a stolen white minivan. All through the movie up until now, we’ve been hearing snippets on TV and radio news about three robbers who botched a convenience store hold-up and are still at large. (“Botched” as in “fled without the money,” not “accidentally killed the clerk.” It must be a slow news cycle if every broadcast for several days is dominated by updates on three bumbling criminals who didn’t hurt anyone and didn’t get away with the loot.) And now our trio of wanna-be-baddies decides that the model home is a perfect hideout for a couple of days.

Our criminal masterminds are Del (John Diehl), Richie (Stuart Fratkin) and Louie (Tony Longo), the latter two of whom are playing the same roles as slow-witted hoodlums that they played in Prehysteria! the same year — even the character names are the same. They easily break in the back door, and then Del recognizes the security system inside as using pressure pads under the carpeted section of floor, so they borrow the ladder conveniently standing against the house to build a bridge over those areas, thus trapping Randy in the attic.

Did I say there were no horrific elements? Gaah! I see that Alpine climber in my dreams!

Randy thus pesters them from the attic, stealing food and dropping thumbtacks into shoes; the ductwork in the ceiling comes apart easily, giving Randy convenient spots from which to drop and grab things. His most useful R/C gadget is an Alpine mountainclimber figure that looks as if it were created for this feature; with its huge head on its toddler-proportioned body and its forced gold-toothed grin, it looks like something from Andre Toulon’s second string. (Though I can’t see Andre Toulon making a toy that yodels every time it’s put into action.)

“And now, through the magic of forced perspective…”

There are plenty of pratfalls, though not nearly as many as you would see in a Home Alone movie (hey, stuntmen cost money!). My main quibble, though, is not with the budget; as usual, it’s that the story keep backing off from any engaging emotion. Randy’s and Judy’s almost-romance is made visible in a single scene, but then it’s never alluded to again. Ben the bully is an almost-constant presence for the first half of the movie, then disappears entirely once Randy is in trouble. (If you’re going to fall back on the cliché of the pointlessly cruel bully, at least give us the satisfaction of seeing him get his comeuppance!) And probably most glaring, Randy has no major emotional reaction to being trapped in the attic above three wanted criminals. At most, he seems annoyed, but really no more despondent than when Mom said she was going to take away his toys.

Guess which one thinks he’s Curly Howard.

I suppose the best word to describe Remote is “slight.” While the Prehysteria! flicks benefited from being the kid-friendly alternative when the dino-mania surrounding the release of Jurassic Park hit, Remote couldn’t hope to fill a niche for a kid-friendly alternative to the Home Alone movies, for obvious reasons. And with the absence of genre content and creature effects, despite its “original idea by Charles Band” (and the contributions of father Albert, brother Richard, and son Alex!), it counts as a forgotten flick even in the context of its largely-ignored Moonbeam cohorts.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Ronald F. Hoiseck (“Security Guard”) played “Vulcan Elder #3″ in Star Trek (2009)