STAY TUNED is a big high concept comedy very suited for an August 14th Weird Summer release. It even has a tagline playing off it being a weird time (“Something weird’s on the air.”) It comes from Morgan Creek Productions, who I respect for bringing us such off kilter mainstream releases as DEAD RINGERS, NIGHTBREED, THE EXORCIST III, TRUE ROMANCE and SOLDIER.
It has some loose connections to other movies we’ve reviewed in this series already. The child narrator character is played by David Tom, the main kid from STEPFATHER 3. The villain is played by Jeffrey Jones, the lead of MOM AND DAD SAVE THE WORLD. The director is Peter Hyams, who 17 years later will be cinematographer for the fourth sequel to summer of ’92’s UNIVERSAL SOLDIER. The makeup effects are by Tom Woodruff, Jr. and Alec Gillis, who did top shelf work in ALIEN 3 and DEATH BECOMES HER. (Woodruff played the titular alien, even – he should’ve played the TV here.) And the producers tried to get Tim Burton to direct it, but he chose BATMAN RETURNS instead*.
To me it doesn’t seem anything like a Tim Burton movie, or like “THE EVIL DEAD meets Monty Python” as screenwriters Tom S. Parker & Jim Jennewein (sharing story credit with Richard Siegel) supposedly pitched it. What it reminds me of really is a HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS type movie. I know we already got a sequel to that this summer, but this is kinda like HONEY WE’RE STUCK IN THE TV, with delusions of being ROBOCOP. (read the rest of this shit…)
I’ve been trying to put my finger on the specific vibe I sense in early ‘90s (pre-Tarantino) indie-cinema. We hit on the topic with 
August 7, 1992 brought us the release of not only best picture winner 
They used to say that August was the “dog days,” when all the shitty movies get dumped. Yeah, okay, maybe some of them. But August 7, 1992 was when they released one of the best movies of the ’90s. A movie I continue to watch every couple years and absolutely love. One of those movies that’s kind of seen as a commentary on its genre but really it’s just a high watermark for it. This was even the movie that won best picture that year. Oh yeah no I’m not talking about 3 NINJAS yet, I’m talking about Clint Eastwood’s 
July 31, 1992
THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING is the new George god damn Miller movie. So obviously you should see it. Here are some thoughts.
Well, I’m afraid it seems my fellow people who write about movies were not open to a giant corporation treating an 80+ year old animation masterpiece as i.p. to remake in a modern style, especially coming from a once A-list director they’ve turned on in his later, weirder years. So they engaged in a hyperbole measuring contest to find out who could hate Robert Zemeckis’s PINOCCHIO (2022) most outlandishly.
The trailer for BARBARIAN suggests an intriguing and pretty straight forward horror-thriller idea. Tess (Georgina Campbell, 
Back in 2016 I did a review series where I alternated between Francois Truffaut’s five Adventures of Antoine Doinel films and Cannon Films’ five AMERICAN NINJA films, trying to keep the same open mind toward both, look for parallels, etc. I referred to it as Antoine vs. Ninja at the time, but now I like to think of it as The 400 Death Blows. Although I’m way more of a ninja guy than a French New Wave guy I think it’s good to try out a broad spectrum of art and not be put off by some other dip shit’s perception of what is supposed to be high or lowbrow or too trashy or too arty for little old you. Fuck that guy. You’re not that simple. You can appreciate all kinds of things.
“She’s dead, sir. They took her to the morgue.”
