Munchies (USA, 1987) 83 min color DIR: Tina Hirsch. SCR: Lance Smith. PROD: Roger Corman. MUSIC: Ernest Troost. DOP: Jonathan West. CAST: Harvey Korman, Charlie Stratton, Nadine Van der Velde, Alix Elias, Paul Bartel. (Concorde-New Horizons)
Once Roger Corman opened his Concorde New Horizons studio, a lot more light-hearted movies came off the assembly line than at his previous home of New World. It has been said that during the Concorde years, Corman was catching up to trends instead of leading them. In this case, he is playing catch-up to the rash of “little creature” movies made after the success of Gremlins, made by his ex-employee Joe Dante.
Harvey Korman (slumming it until the next reunion of The Carol Burnett Show), plays Professor Cecil Watterman, who on an archaelogical dig with his son in Peru, discovers this creature and brings it back home. Simon, his evil twin brother (also Korman), a food entrepreneur, kidnaps the thing and chops it up, which only forms little “Munchies” who cause all sorts of destruction. It is a sorry state of affairs when Korman plays two roles in a movie where there is barely enough substance for one.
In her sole foray as a director, Tina Hirsch, the first female president of the American Cinema Editor’s guild, and (ironically) the editor of Gremlins, is all thumbs with comic timing, but to her credit, has little to work with anyway, as scenes play on endlessly after they’ve worn out their welcome. This movie was popular on videocassette, for it did have the fortune of riding the home video wave after Gremlins made a splash, but it is hard to imagine anyone above 5 years of age comfortably sitting through this. While surely it has just as much mayhem as its inspiration, Gremlins was also a very clever criticism of white picket fence America and a brilliant pop culture in-joke. Instead, we get some guy smoking dope listening to the Grateful Dead who quickly becomes Munchie bait, in a scene that at least proves once and for all that the 80s killed off the hippies, and dreck like this became the norm over clever entertainment. Undaunted, Corman followed up with an in-name-only sequel, Munchie.