And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird

Directed by Tony Cookson, And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird follows siblings Josh (Joshua Miller) and Max (Edan Gross) as they invent a robot that’s eventually possessed by the spirit of their dead father (Alan Thicke’s Matthew). It’s an oddball premise that’s employed to predominantly tiresome and downright interminable effect by Cookson, as the filmmaker, working from his own screenplay, delivers an often astonishingly sluggish endeavor that contains few, if any, elements designed to capture and sustain the attention of older viewers – with the lowest-common-denominator-type atmosphere perpetuated by the larger-than-life performances and ongoing emphasis on eye-rollingly juvenile bits of humor. (It doesn’t help, either, that Cookson has suffused the narrative with unearned instances of treacly sentimentality that are about as affecting as a punch to the face.) There’s little doubt, as a result, that large swaths of And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird remain almost impossible to comfortably endure, and it’s difficult, ultimately, to envision even the movie’s target audience of small children sitting through this thing without getting restless and antsy – which cements the picture’s place as a predominantly worthless piece of work that’s aged terribly in the years since its 1991 release.

1/2* out of ****