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| Tookey's Review |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
1989 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
SO BAD
FAMILY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
98 |
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Heidi (Juliette Caton), an innocent Swiss country-girl, leaves her kindly grandfather (Jan Rubes), a Santa Claus lookalike much given to praying with soft music in the background, in order to attend a stuffy boarding school in Italy. Here, Heidi is taught by the kindly Mrs Hillary (Leslie Caron) but finds herself abducted to work as slave labour in a rat-infested orphanage for the wicked Signor Bonelli (Yorgo Voyagis). Heidi, determined that little girls should be seen but not herded, leads the escape of some of the children back to Switzerland.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Pure Alpencorn, this will offer innocent entertainment to the young, while older audiences should find it unintentionally hilarious. This is a belated sequel to the 1880 novel Heidi and the 1937 movie of the same name, which starred Shirley Temple. The plot is sufficiently fast and furious for child audiences not to be bothered by the extreme badness of the script, the inadequate acting, the continuity errors and the glaring anachronisms. There is, for example, a remarkable close-up of the Times front page in 1915, all banner headlines and with the modern masthead.
Grown-ups may be perturbed by the fact that Heidi (Juliette Caton) looks like a prematurely permed 11 year-old from the London suburbs, while her boyfriend Peter (Charlie Sheen) resembles a brooding, 30 year-old baseball-player from the Bronx. Understandably discomforted at playing so obvious a paedophile, Charlie Sheen gives one of the worst performances ever committed to celluloid. Imagine Marlon Brando cast as Peter Pan, and you'll get the general idea.
The film culminates in one of the most embarrassing love scenes in cinematic history, when Heidi comes downstairs exuding Gigi-esque glamour and under-age sex appeal, whereupon Peter gulps and hurriedly remembers a previous business engagement: "I have to leave," he mumbles. "There is a war on."
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, Leslie Caron