The 90s On Netflix: Drop Dead Fred (1991)
Review Overview
Mary Poppins
6Beetlejuice
6Rik Mayall
7.5Mark Harrison | On 25, Feb 2022
Director: Ate de Jong
Cast: Phoebe Cates, Rik Mayall, Carrie Fisher, Marsha Mason, Tim Matheson
Certificate: 12
Do you remember the 1990s? Mark does. In this column, he flashes back to the golden decade of our childhood. From family-friendly films to blockbusters we shouldn’t have been watching, get ready for a monthly dose of nostalgia, as we put down our VHS tapes and find out whether the 90s on Netflix are still Live & Kicking.
What makes a film “divisive”? It’s true that you can’t please everyone, but does any filmmaker go into a new project wanting to make a film to please some people? As a descriptor, “divisive” comments more on on a film’s reception than on the film itself. So, in this sense, Drop Dead Fred is unquestionably the most “divisive” film we’ve ever covered in this column. On the surface of it, it’s like pure cinematic Marmite but, upon reflection, there’s more of a curate’s egg sort of whiff about all the more recent reappraisals, including this one, frankly. We lean more towards liking it than not, but it’s objectively the most post-punk “rip it up and start again” artefact to come out of the 90s wave of studio comedies.
The film’s main character is Elizabeth (Phoebe Cates), a timid court reporter who loses her husband (Tim Matheson), her car and her job in one terrible lunch hour. Worse, her domineering mother (Marsha Mason) seems to blame her for everything. Wallowing in nostalgia, Lizzie opens a taped-up jack-in-the-box and unleashes her inner Rik Mayall, in the form of her childhood imaginary friend, “Drop Dead” Fred. While she tries to rebuild her shattered life, Fred has different ideas and messes things up even more.
The British-American production was established at Working Title with writers Tony Fingleton and Carlos Davis selling it as a vehicle for Mayall, who was then best known in the UK for The Young Ones. Drop Dead Fred wound up being his one and only Hollywood starring role after the film’s box-office failure and a joyless publicity tour in the States – his awkward interview with a hostile David Letterman is the stuff of nightmares – but that only makes his performance more unique.
Splitting the difference between Beetlejuice and Mary Poppins, Fred is a big imp who’s there to screw everything up but only until Lizzie’s ego has healed and she no longer needs him. Mayall pitches his childish anarchy as big as it needs to be to balance Cates’ understated and poignant performance, but despite all the loud, stupid, funny over-the-top antics, there’s definitely nuance in there. He’s seemingly too much for some viewers’ tastes, but he’s still probably only at about 75 per cent volume here, and he’s capable of warmth and pathos too.
In supporting roles, Mason and Matheson play their characters’ brand of banal toxicity to a tee, but there’s also a delightful turn from the always-marvellous Carrie Fisher, elevating what could have been a throwaway best-friend role into a more memorable character. On a production where director Ate de Jong said the Americans and Europeans stuck to their own cliques, Fisher unifies things with a subplot about Fred destroying her houseboat.
In its freewheeling execution, the effects and the gags don’t always land and it’s not as good at the live-action cartoon thing as The Mask would be a few years later. As a metaphor, though, the story almost prefigures the personality islands in Pixar’s Inside Out by taking down those symbols of Lizzie’s adulthood as they’d appear to a kid – her husband, her car, her job – and rebuilding what she actually wants. Or to put it another way, ripping it up and starting again.
But hey, we’re not doing an explainer here – the symbolism of Fred’s re-emergence as a mental breakdown is all there, dressed in garish green and yellow and demanding to be taken at face value. Trying to ignore the psychological poltergeist in the room is exactly the sort of mindset that the film is sending up.
Equally, you can know all this and not care for the film’s subversive and blackly comic mental-health metaphor. There are certain points where it falls apart internally, like the supposedly happy ending that sees Fred assigned to another kid, despite all of what that means for why that child would need him.
This is where the whole “divisive” thing comes in, most notably in the 2019 episode of the podcast How Did This Get Made?, which splits the hosts and the audience down the lines of “Team Fred” and “Team Sanity”. In this binary approach, you either see the film as a knowing comedy about mental health or an enormous folly with no control over its tone or themes.
Probably for all of these reasons, Drop Dead Fred was a commercial flop in cinemas, but an enduring hit with kids who first saw the film on VHS. Its initial 15 certificate merely preceded the introduction of 12 as a video certificate in 1994, but also added to the idea that we were seeing something rude and subversive and anarchic.
While there was fleeting talk of a remake before Mayall’s sad passing in 2014, it should always have been obvious that this is reboot-proof. Not least for its lead performance, it’s too unique a thing to simply rip up and start again. Maybe the most immutably brilliant thing about the film is that, like Lizzie, you can know Drop Dead Fred from when you were a child and have a completely different experience when you meet it again in adulthood.
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