Directed & written by: Jeff Lieberman
Starring: Kevin Dillon, Deborah Goodrich, Christopher Wynn, Frank Beddor, Jennifer Tilly
Music by: Peter Bernstein
Taglines: “As close to home as your VCR.”
“The ultimate power trip.”
“Your future is in their hands.”
STORY
Cosmo (Dillon) is a well-meaning but lunkish teenager working at a video store. Working along with his best friend, Cosmo has a crush on a girl who comes in to look for arthouse movies, which he attempts to quote in order to win her affections. Unfortunately, she already has a jock boyfriend, and he doesn’t have much to offer her.
Meanwhile, there’s a new video release that’s amazingly popular by the name of Remote Control. As we see in the opening sequence, Remote Control is no ordinary VHS – after seeing an onscreen character get possessed by a signal coming from the TV and kill the person in the room with them, the same thing happens to the person watching the film! Naturally, Cosmo and his friend band together, picking up the girl on the way, to discover the deadly secret behind Remote Control and save the world before the tape dooms us all.
OPINION
Like Lieberman’s previous movie Blue Sunshine, this is a nice little B-movie that just makes a few many little mis-steps to be truly effective. For the most part this works as an interesting companion piece to the ’80s remake of The Blob – also starring Dillon – with a lone group of teenagers saving a small town from a danger with surprising origins.
The movie has a very interesting look, with most characters spoting strange hairdos and shiny outfits not unlike those featured in 50s sci-fi visions of the “future”. On top of this, the movie-within-a-movie is quite effective, a tongue-in-cheek but respectful recreation of a cheap 50s sci-fi b-movie.
However, the movie is let down somewhat by the uneven tone. The film never quite settles down into being serious or spoofing its subject matter. The film-within-a-film is quite effective the first time you watch it, but there’s a lot of repeated footage that becomes a little tiresome, especially with the device of characters looking at an image of themselves onscreen then taking an age to realise that it’s not a good thing. The broad humour and sci-fi references can be fun, but never quite settle down into a coherent whole.
Overall though, it’s a neat little movie that’s entertaining enough for fans of either the sci-fi or horror genres. It’s never particularly gory (though the opening murder is extremely explicit by 50s sci-fi standards) and the light tone stops it from being scary, but it’s fun enough to keep you going till the end.
Unfortunately, this is a hard film to get hold of today. As far as I know, it’s never been officially released on DVD and only had a short VHS run back in the ’80s. The copy I’ve taken my screenshots from was a download that was ripped from Swedish TV (hence the subs), and even that’s not an easy copy to get hold of. A shame, especially as Lieberman’s other ’80s directorial effort Just Before Dawn has been given the full DVD treatment in recent years. Hopefully, this can be revisited at some point in the future…
Rating: 
[...] Remote Control (1987) [...]