This box-office flop is the only movie that let Martin Short be Martin Short
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Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With the release of Andy Samberg’s Palm Springs and the latest Ghostbusters sequel getting pushed to 2021, we’re highlighting movies starring Saturday Night Live alumni.
Clifford (1994)
When Martin Short says, “I’m gonna go big,” he means it. Especially when he’s making that declaration 18 minutes into Clifford, a movie where he’s already been pummeled by a suitcase, flung a toy dinosaur into the air from an airplane tray table, and made an apoplectic Richard Kind look like he’s underacting. If there’s a unifying trait to Short’s performances in SCTV, Saturday Night Live, and the 1994 cult classic that was essentially the end of “Martin Short, Movie Star,” it’s bigness. Which is ironic in that last case, because the visuals of Clifford do as much as they can to make Short, playing a 10-year-old boy hellbent on visiting a prehistoric theme park, appear very small.
Short is one of our last great variety performers, an actor of range who can carry a tune and whose wild physicality both translates to choreography and plays all the way to the cheap seats. Before he was a kid in Clifford, he played characters like Ed Grimley, Jackie Rogers Jr., and Ned Nederlander with the busting-out-all-over energy of a child—something that kills in a sketch, but can be difficult to sustain for an entire feature. Clifford puts this to the test: Every new set piece, every absurd escalation in the battle of wits between Clifford (Short) and his architect uncle Martin (Charles Grodin), risks burning the audience out. Contemporary reviews suggests it did just that, leaving a Rotten Tomatoes fossil record littered with criticisms like “wearying,” “obnoxious,” and “gimmicky.” Yet if you’re tuned into Short’s peculiar wavelength, his indefatigability keeps Clifford aloft. Just when you think he and the movie might be losing steam, director Paul Flaherty (another SCTV alum) sends them galloping across a train platform, belting out a Judy Garland impression.
Clifford is full of huge swings like this, and a remarkable number of them connect—each a defiant gesture against conventional wisdom. Most movies don’t cast an established, 40-year-old star as an elementary schooler whose tailor apparently specializes in clothes for Angus Young ventriloquist dummies. Most film comedies wouldn’t position that manchild as a vessel of grinning malevolence preternaturally gifted at manipulating people as well as electronics. Clifford could be read as a devilish parody of the “kids rule, adults drool” capers that rode to the multiplex on the coattails of Home Alone and Nickelodeon, were it not for the fact that Clifford was shot the same year as Kevin McCallister’s first encounter with the Wet Bandits, only to become one of several movies waylaid by the bankruptcy of Orion Pictures. Imagine building the elaborate, only-in-the-movies combination of Audio-Animatronics and roller coaster design that plays the setting for Clifford’s climax, only to wait four years before getting to show it off—and then having to wait even longer for the film’s reputation to be rehabilitated by comedy geeks and the kids who’d grown up watching it on VHS.
In the time that passed between Clifford’s completion and its release, Grodin had fronted the first two Beethoven movies, doing a parallel-universe take on Martin’s mounting middle-aged-square exasperation opposite a Saint Bernard. He’s indispensable here, providing Short with a foil who plausibly won’t put up with Clifford’s tomfoolery, but can also go as big as his co-star if need be. (The crowning achievement of Flaherty’s direction involves putting Short, Grodin, and Kind in the same film while disguising all the giant cartoon bite marks they’ve left in the scenery.) There are times when Clifford is practically a two-hander powered by the friction between Short and Grodin’s outrageously selfish characters: The boy using his uncle to get a trip to Dinosaur World, the man using his nephew to convince his fiancé, Sarah (Mary Steenburgen), that he’s ready to start a family.
There’s an argument to be made for Clifford as a projection of the anxieties of first-time parenthood, Short embodying the worst-case-scenario a guy like Martin would dream up. But that’s awfully highfalutin for a film that builds space into a house party sequence in order for Short to channel Ed Grimley on the dance floor. Somewhere in the journey from script to screen, someone tried to force filmmaking norms of growth and resolution onto Clifford, but as important as its lessons in empathy are, it’s a lot better when it’s allowed to just be itself: 90 minutes articulating Short’s tactic of entertainment at all costs. Clifford believes, perhaps incorrectly, that “Dinosaur World is the only place where a boy like me can be happy.” Clifford is the only movie where Martin Short can be Martin Short.
The film recognizes that this is all very strange. As Martin starts to come unglued, he wraps up a heart-to-heart by barking at his nephew: “Look at me like a human boy!” As Grodin speaks the idiosyncratically fussy language of Clifford, his dialogue plays over footage of Short pulling faces and adjusting his posture. Every choice—the camera holding on Short, the actor’s glassy-eyed countenance, the way Martin’s rising temperature causes Grodin to slam one line into the next—couldn’t happen in any other movie. Who else would think to let it happen this way, or even allow it to? That’s the cracked genius of Clifford in a nutshell.
Availability: Clifford is streaming on HBO Max, and is available for rental or purchase from Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, and VUDU.
145 Comments
I frigging love this movie.
Alternately, just watch Innerspace instead and be entertained instead of, you know, enervated.
Joe Dante is an underappreciated genius.
And we can swoon at Meg Ryan’s adorability.Why Meg? Why?
Just watched Joe vs the Volcano with my little sister, and she literally didn’t recognize Meg Ryan, Both because she does a great job in that movie but also, y’know. Hollywood’s a real bitch sometimes.
That is one misunderstood movie. I watch it once a year and it never gets old.
Probably just a bit too weird for the mainstream, but I’m a fan.
Yesssss! I clicked expecting it to be Innerspace. It seems like Clifford (which I haven’t seen) might have been a truer transference of Short’s weird comic person to the screen. Inner space took it and modified it, and created a Hollywood container fot it, not that that was a bad thing.
Short’s a ridiculously off-beat guy, which works best for sure in minor doses. I can’t imagine an Ed Grimley feature, for instance. So much of his humor is of the WTF?! variety, and that definitely wears off over 90 minutes. Granted Paul Reubens managed it beautifully with Pee Wee Hermin.
So many of his characters seem to have the same, semi cross-eyed, creepy half-grin look that you see in the freeze from the clip up there that it’s kind of disorienting when you see him interviewed looking like a normal person.
Like a less committed Andy Kaufman.
I’M POSSESSED!!
Hot take: Clifford is an enervating and exhausting for the soul as watching Human Centipede…2.
The film feels so malevolent that pretending that’s the intended joke seems similarly malevolent. Only if the kid had died and haunted Charles Grodin (or if he had actually murdered Grodin himself) would this be a good take on the film, but “comedy geeks” who like to rehabilitate this joyless stinker always seem to forget that the film is bookended by future priest Clifford telling the story of his life to a “similar” problem child to help him stop being a problem. So we’re invited to trust that this universe DOES have a moral center, that learning is what we’re supposed to be doing here, yet we’re expected to treat this kid essentially performing a terrorist act on an entire plane as something incorrigible instead of worth considering whether this child should be tried as an adult. That unwillingness to go all the way makes for an exhausting experience that doesn’t let us believe in Clifford eventually having a soul. It’d be like watching Animal House, but there were scenes that showed women breaking down in tears after their encounters with the Deltas, or had a couple scenes of Bluto’s family solemnly talking with him about his alcoholism. You can’t invite us to treat something as funny and as monstrous and not expect monstrous to win.
And I say this loving every single artist involved, including Short. His performance IS astounding. Maybe with slightly different direction, editing, and writing this would rightfully be seen as a classic. I don’t know. All I know is that it’s too mean to let its jokes land like it wants to, and by making Martin Short appear unlikable and Mary Steenburgen seem like a naive fool, it double makes the audience want to retch.
The “gee ain’t I a stinker” response doesn’t work as a defense for borderline terrorism and gaslighting, unfortunately, and that sinks this film. Try watching any movie with a Donald Trump cameo these days, or an episode of The Apprentice, and that will give you a good idea about what it’s like to watch Clifford.
Beautifully put. I remember watching this when I was, I wanna say, 13 or 14 when it first came out on VHS, and I remember having heard of the effort they’d put into making Martin Short look like a kid and all that (like the ‘maze’ built into the floor for the party sequence) and being legitimately impressed by said effort. But I actually found the movie painful to watch and it actually kind of ruined Martin Short for me after that. Like, I could still appreciate some of his earlier stuff, but that was about it.
I couldn’t get past the first 15 minutes of Human Centipede 2. Not because I was disgusted but just bored…..and a little disgusted.
It’s a terrible, awful, no-good movie, a horrible experience to endure.
Dude, you need to relax a bit.
*looks around, sitting in pajamas, barely brushing crumbs off his chest, underemployed*
…I think if I got any more relaxed I’d need a defibrillator.
Fair enough, I just meant this movie isn’t worth getting worked up over, even if things like “forcing a plane to land” plays a lot worse in 2020 then it did in 1994.
The nicest thing I can say is that AV Club is a site for movie geeks, so it makes sense one of their writers would talk about this film as it is that they’ve done similar pieces on “Showgirls” and other clangers.But I wish they could have reviewed it the way you did. Pointing out that it this kind of comedy is not mainstream. That being the case, to put a lot of money behind it, is always a mistake. When “Blazing Saddles” got pushed out, it was not an expensive movie. No one really big was in it. So the film would have done well, like other Brooks movies, precisely because his audience was big enough to support the thing, if it happened to turn off a general mainstream audience. That’s why none of Brooks’ films lost money. But Martin Short, who was hot at the time, getting his usual fee alongside an expensive production and marketing? (which I remember from the time) For a film sold like it was “Problem Child” but which was actually more like an indulgent Jerry Lewis joint? Never going to earn.
This review is a perfect example of how the forward progress of society can potentially discolor the events of a film.Understand, I’m not here to disagree with your notes, nor am I here to bury or praise “Clifford” – in full disclosure, it’s among my ex-wife’s favorite films, which may say a lot about my cinematic travails for a very difficult 15 years – but I’d wager that the eyes that viewed it in 1994 weren’t quite as critical of its sins. It’s a fluff vehicle for Short to act out his best-worst impulses as a shitty preteen kid, but it’s also best viewed through the eyes of someone that hasn’t yet experienced, say, 9/11 yet. The events on the plane weren’t yet being viewed as a crime with grave consequences, so it didn’t immediately at the time put viewers on their heels. I’d say it’s probably some kind of ham-fisted riff on the old trope of “there’s always a misbehaving kid on your airplane.”The entire point of this entire farce of a movie appears to be the one-sentence mantra, which is GET A LOAD OF THIS SHITTY KID THAT TAKES IT TOO FAR. In its way, “Clifford” is a bizarre kind of time capsule that partially paved the way for other parents-dealing-with-awful-kids movies like “Step Brothers” – which, weirdly enough, also featured Steenburgen in the Exasperated Put-Upon Parent role. But I only find it grating, thankfully. Not criminal.
My only response is: I didn’t need 9/11 to happen to find this film discomfiting. I was deeply disturbed by the gaslighting perpetrated by Clifford as a teenager in the 90s when it came out, I was disturbed by it in college when I saw it again, and I’m even MORE disturbed by it when people defend it now as some sort of secret comedy gold. Thus the diatribe.
Focusing on the “plane terrorist” element when it is one sentence out of FAR too many up there is rather convenient when facing the overwhelming evidence that the film is just mean, ugly, and cruel in every sense and at almost every moment possible, not just discomfiting for “modern sensibilities”.
The actual predecessor of movies like Step-brothers are movies like Problem Child or What About Bob? And while both are far more saccharine than Clifford, they don’t make you wince, they make you laugh. No filmgoing experience is worse than a comedy that is not funny, because you can’t even make fun of it. Just ask the MST3K folks.
Oh, it’s FOR SURE not comedy gold. Let’s dispense with that idea right now. (And I’ll try to keep this brief, since you and I are the only ones left in this thread, so maybe hit the lights on the way out.)Anyone that tells you it is some kind of forgotten gem is flat-out selling a narrative that has no basis in reality, objective or otherwise. To be clear, though… I don’t disagree with the lion’s share of your assessment, so there’s no need for any kind of pique. Especially about a film that’s, by most people’s estimations, at BEST should be left forgotten. I just don’t happen to believe it’s the comedic equivalent of a war crime. It’s an ugly, little thing. My perception (and please, take my opinion for what it’s worth) is that “Clifford” is simply a weird, unsightly little artifact that never really found its audience, and I suspect the reason for that is such a group doesn’t exist.But again, it doesn’t rise to the level of a monstrosity in my eyes, if only because it’s ultimately so forgettable. I hadn’t thought about it in years until this article popped up. It’s not even so unique that it becomes some kind of curiosity, like Tod Browning’s “Freaks.” It’s truly the cinematic equivalent of a Gacy clown painting. Even if you *didn’t* know what its etymology was, you still wouldn’t hang it in your guest bathroom.
I was entertained by “Clifford.” I don’t think I’ve ever been “enervated” by anything other than Guardians of the Galaxy.
I love Martin Short, but he really has a knack for portraying grotesque and off-putting characters. Jiminy Glick, plus his characters on Arrested Development and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, are enough to make me clench my sphincter in anxiety whenever he shows up in something.
Plus, the host of the Canadian Pavilion at Epcot!
Ah, the Chris Elliott effect
That’s Eagleheart to you, tough guy.
Nice, bro!
Chris Elliot is a Goshdang genius. Sometimes. (Get a Life was one of the funniest things ever to be put on TV.)
He’s like Norm McDonald; as long as he himself is entertained, he really doesn’t give a fuck what other people think. He was to Letterman as Norm is to Conan. Remember his Brando, where he’s show up making baked beans and spilling them out of his mouth down his apron? I mean just BIZARRE.
His Letterman bits were pretty great!
Chris Elliot is a guy you expect to be a cool unassuming good guy but turns out to be the guy who says painfully disturbing things in the most nonchalant tone. He’s like the evil twin of H. Jon Benjamin. Elliot himself seems like a solid human being but his characters if they’re not naive are so disturbingly unpleasant….Eagleheart actually worked to his favor on that front.
He drove me crazy on “Schitt’s Creek”, but in a very good way. By the end of the show’s run I was involuntarily screaming “Shut up, Roland!” whenever he’d start to say anything. Then laughing my head off.
That character could have gone SO wrong, but in the end everything Johnny says in his defense of Roland is right. He did help the Roses find a place to live, loan them his truck when they needed, etc. Now he was a scam artist as well, but they even made that part of his persona charming.
I love Glick, maybe because I love Short’s complete weirdness. That clip of him and Grodin playing off each other is enough to convince me to watch the movie.
I wanna say…Mason.
I say that every time I meet a Mason. That and “look at me like a human boy!”
It me, I’m that kid who watched it on vhs over and over. There’s a movie where he plays a guy with super bad luck against Danny Glover I enjoyed a lot too, but he’s definitely crazier in this dark comedy.
Goddamn, how I miss Charles Grodin. Anyone who can act as great with a Muppet as he did in ‘The Great Muppet Caper’ deserves to be carved into the side of a mountain. Even his bit part as the guy who won’t let Anthony LaPaglia’s cop commandeer his car is a delight.
I had to double check, Grodin is still alive. I get the effect he has on folks but he’s such annoying man apparently off-screen as well that I always wondered of his true appeal beyond playing that guy…Also, fun note: He was 55 playing against Short, 40, and Mary Steenbergen, 37 and mind as well have been 103. She’s always looked 40-something-ish, it’s really weird to have grown up watching her and realize she’s finally old after being old forever.
I liked Charles Grodin for his film roles, and I still do, but I made the mistake of watching several episodes of his TV show, which was pure torture. Never really seen him the way since night after night of rambling rants about the OJ trial. (Dana Carvey did a very funny parody of his show – so funny he did it on two different sketch shows)
There were literally only “several episodes”… cancelled after only 3.
I was talking about his talk show, which ran from 95-98.
“…blood on the Bronco…sigh.” – Dana Carvey’s Charles Grodin.
Does he have the reputation for being difficult? I thought that anyone who played uptight and difficult the way he did with Letterman must actually be a pretty easy-going guy.
Supposedly he tanked his early SNL appearance and was banned from the show but I watched it and it seems like a set-up.
I never saw his talk show but if you told me Grodin was a nice guy playing difficult who aged into being genuinely difficult I would not be at all surprised.
I watched the SNL appearence and thought it was pretty obvious that Grodin being a screw up was a 4th wall breaking gag. Most of the show is built around him not showing to rehearsal, breaking character, and just being unprofessional. They did similar bits with BelushiNow, maybe they went in that direction because Grodin really was an unprofessional prick and that was them salvaging the show, but it’s pretty clear that it was planned.I was under the impression that Grodin was into alt or anti comedy where the goal was to confuse, frustrate or even alienate your audience. That would actually fit well with SNL’s head writer at the time, Michael O’Donoghue
They seem to be sticking to the story that he’s banned from SNL over it so who knows, people may have been easier to fool with that kind of stuff back then.
They never invited him back and Belushi was exactly who he was but a fan favorite so his behavior was tolerated…right into an OD grave.SNL will definitely let you be a prick if you’re doing it right but Grodin wasn’t. Also, O’Donoghue’s power is severely overblown in terms of getting them to do weird shit. He was instrumental in getting Frank Zappa on and doing a bunch of straight weird shit in the early years but most people noted that it was his weird shit that ended up negating his power as Michaels kept asserting dominance because O’Donoghue couldn’t make his avant garde stuff work. You have to really LOVE early SNL to recall a single one of his skits, I saw through the first 7 or 8 seasons a number of years back as an effort to experience it all and his things are funny in the 2000/10s because I think his comedy won out but in terms of the time, they’re definitely weird and wonky.
I would like…to feed your fingertips…to the wolverines.
Might have been a mutual split where he decided he disliked them as much as they disliked him. Or they thought it was funny to pretend that it was a disaster. Dunno.Mor or less agree with you on O’Donoghue in the big picture. By season 3, they had entered the Samurai Delicatessen of high concept and that was basically it. The first season had a much more experimental feel with Al Franken’s short videos or the “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” bit, but it was never in danger of turning into “Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video.” Either way, Grodin would have had at least some support between O’Donoghue and Ackroyd, who was also into weird shit. There was at least a precedent.
Yeah, the issue was by Season 3 they were a bonafide hit show and Michaels wasn’t interested in letting O’Donoghue keep doing what was either underground or college-style humor. There was a distinct shift from that sort of ‘this is strange for strange’s sake’ to a sort of more ‘i’m hip but also doing Carson-esque stuff.’ Michaels is always the leash that only slackens when better sketch shows threaten him, see In Living Color, MadTV in the first few years, etc…
But O’Donoghue can definitely be seen as a direct ancestor to the Ricky and Morty’s of the world.
I always thought it went more hand in glove with his droll, curmudgeonly persona, which included a complete lack of patience with foolishness. Which was for sure put best to use in movies like Midnight Run (“why aren’t you popular with the Chicago police department?”) and Dave.
As a kid, I loved Grodin’s Letterman’s appearances more than just about any role he played. If those two were around forty years earlier, they could have had their own version of the Crosby and Hope Road Movies.
I’ve never heard real horror stories but there is a reason why he career kind of fizzled after 40. I can’t quite tell if his schtick got old ala Carvey/Mike Meyers or he was a pain to work with. I mean, it was clear he had friends in the industry who kept giving him roles but where Bill Murray basically took roles that interested him and did his thing, I gathered Short’s dried up because his career just couldn’t handle his constant abusiveness. I’ve never seen him ‘turn off’ though in an interview, which is kind of telling about who he is. He has basically one gear and that’s not conducive to functioning especially as you get older and are expected to take on more age-appropriate roles. Short doesn’t play father figures and I guess that’s as much to do with his demise as anything else.
He nailed it with his serious turn on Damages as a lawyer for the Bernie Madoff avatar.Part of Short’s issue is that the characters he created had little to no entry point. Like Jimminy glick is an amazingly nuanced and observed characted…..but……why? Why do that? Why go through all the physical and emotional prosthesis to nail that character just right. It’s like equipping your nuclear bomb with a scalpel.
That I can agree with. That fundamentally he’ll go to great lengths to play with what amounts to an unpleasant experience which is why I think I really despise him as a comedian. I only enjoy Short when he gets his comeuppance. In the 3 Amigos where he gets beaten senseless is probably my favorite moments of his. His one character I enjoy is Ed Grimley because Ed is sort of the opposite of nearly all Short characters, he’s weird, strange, and out there but fundamentally a *good* person. If you enjoy playing egotistical pricks with no self-awareness, maybe there is some weird 13D chess-level of self-satire in it but after a while it just feels like you’re using it as an excuse to play that asshole to applause without the punishment that goes along with it.
He showed promise as a viable romantic leading man in Cross My Heart, a film I’ve seen repeatedly because I have a thing for Annette O’Toole (she is super lusciously babe-a-licious in it).Not the best movie (the third-act hijinks don’t play well) but it shows Short can play a normal person.
[No one will see this recommendation because I cannot get out of teh greyz.]
I think Steenburgen passed beyond the looking 40-ish phase in the last decade, but weirdly I think she actually looks better now. I always liked her as an actress but never found her particularly attractive, but when she popped up in 30 Rock and Bored to Death right before she turned 60 I suddenly found her gorgeous, and that continued through her more recent stint on Last Man on Earth. I think her husband Ted Danson also looks better now in his later years.
Yeah, on Justified she looked in her 50s but she still looks amazing. I just remember seeing her and going ‘how old is she?!?’ as a child. Like, she was playing Doc Brown’s love in BttF PIII who was already 50 and she was 35 but again, pairs up well because she looked 40-ish.
Silver Fox Ted Danson is pretty great, especially doing roles like Arthur Frobisher on Damages.
Aw man, nobody ever mentions Damages! He was great in that. I watched it a few years after it ended, and while its not perfect, I think its underrated and seemed to get lost in the big wave of prestige TV.
And he has that moment where he’s standing in front of the electronics store window, with his face on the tv screen, and just makes some weird faces…..and then moves on.Love that scene. No explanation, but a hint that this guy is not as balanced as he seems.
Cary Grant always looked gorgeous of course, but to me, he looks best, BEST in “Charade”, when he was sixty.
Charles Rocket, the Mulroney to Grodin’s McDermott, passed awayMary Steenbergen is always a crush of mine
I like her triple role in Dead of Winter.
She’s not even old. It’s Hollywood. She’s 11 years older than Will Ferrell and was his mother in STEPBROTHERS.
Weirdly, Jenkins who played her new husband is only 7 years her senior, so technically just old enough to be Ferrell’s dad in practical terms.Hollywood is really bad at casting age and Ferrell always desperately wants to play the manchild. What would have been a better film was finding out she was really his wife and that she let him stay after a traumatic brain injury and Jenkins suffered a similar fate with his brother, so their new blended family of sadly MR via accident ‘siblings’ could find comfort. That would actually make more sense than Stepbrothers did as it was written.
Where she was still a total smokeshow.
Yeah but Mary Steenburgen was my childhood crush.
Steenburgen turned up as a femme fatale type on L&O years after Parenthood, Back to the Future and the like, and totally pulled it off. Granted she also still looked great in Step Brothers.
He was supposedly a finalist for The Graduate. I can’t imagine him playing the frantic Ben of the third act, but I think the early stuff with Mrs. Robinson would have been hilarious.
His heartless stubborness in The Heartbeat Kid shows he could have been Benjamin Braddock..
Grodin was pretty hilarious in that “Rosemary’s Baby”.
His turn in Dave was fantastic.
Grodin is responsible for one of my all time favorite comedy scenes
Short was always a better fit for TV, where you could appreciate him in smaller doses.
I’d had similar feelings about Paul Rubins/Pee-Wee Herman back in the day, and had to be kind of dragged to see Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, but that turned out to be a truly inspired use of the character. So, could an unrestrained Short (he was fine in Innerspace and Three Amigos, as noted elsewhere) have really been a hit with the right screenplay and direction? This sounds like the failure I’d expected Pee-Wee’s movie would be.
Pee Wee is a fundamentally sweet character, which makes a big difference. His oddness is endearing, not grating, and his mission is nothing more than a boy wanting his prized bicycle back. He enlists help, rather than trying to manipulate people like Clifford.
I’ll agree with you if you say the same about Adam Sandler…
I have historically HATED this film. I hate everything about it, I always sided with Grodin because by all accounts, he’s right, Clifford is a terrible little asshole and has no redeeming qualities. It’s kind of how I feel Martin Short is as a human being, that he’s really that big of an asshole when the camera shuts off as well. There are places for Short to fit, he works well in an ensemble that allows him to be abrasive and big, chew scenery, then be punched back down like a yeast dough. Pairing him with Steve Martin is genius, Martin can chew scenery like Borgnine did, in this weirdly lovable way, you want him large, but you don’t mind him doing that.The core issue with Clifford is he never truly gets his comeuppances. The framing device at the end with him being a priest who wrote letters of forgiveness is just weird (I had to look up how it ended since it’s been so long). But basically, we never see him learn, just watch him sort of try to undo the damage he does because Grodin is right all along: Clifford is a malicious demon pretending to be a PG kids film. It’s as if Problem Child was remade but forgot to include unlikable people for the child to demolish. Nobody really enjoys people who are uptight having their lives utterly demolished which is the whole problem. Grodin isn’t a great person but he didn’t deserve the level of abuse Clifford inflicts. This is just another example of how I cannot imagine Martin Short being a good person off-set…
Clifford is mean, vindictive, spiteful and cruel. So hateful that if a real little boy had played him, the movie would be like “The Omen” filtered through “The Good Son” and a particularly bad evening of “Saturday Night Live.” -Roger Ebert
I like to think he followed the arc of his L&O SVU cameo character, a serial rapist and killer from Canada who gets his comeuppance at the hands of Stabler and company. If only they could have stopped him as a manipulative child…
There’s a reason he was never allowed to be Martin Short again. He’s not a feature-length guy. SCTV and SNL were all short sketches, and otherwise he’s mostly done guest spots on other peoples’ shows. The less said about his variety show with Maya Rudolph, the better.I will say that, although it’s a terrible movie, Jiminy Glick Goes To Lalawood is an interesting watch. It’s disappointing that after about 20 minutes there are no more celebrity interviews, but that is made up for when Jiminy runs into David Lynch (also played by Short) at the Toronto Film Festival. The rest of the movie becomes a (not very good) homage to Lynch films. Worth it alone for Lynch continually saying “I like the idea of a dark road.”
I love this movie. I could never recommend this movie to any other person.
now i want to see it!
That’s a fantastic way to describe it: “this movie is hilarious but oh god don’t ever watch it.”
I loved this bonkers movie as a kid, but I haven’t seen it in easily 20 years. It’s very heartening to hear that you think it holds up, Erik. I should rewatch it soon.I had no idea it sat on the shelf for four years, but I’m not surprised.
I saw it for the first time as an adult about 2 years ago at a sold out rep screening. I loved it. It sounded like most of the other adults in the room liked it, too.I later watched it with my nieces (7 & 9) and halfway through they asked their mom if she could buy it. So, it’s working for some of us, young and old!
My main memory of Clifford is Roger Ebert’s loathing of the film (he put it in a book of movies he hated). It took me many years to warm to Martin Short – he was always “too much” for me. I finally have, in recent times, but I tend to agree with those who think TV was more suited to his talents.
Some of his SNL skits were major winners, which was my intro to the guy. His synchronized swimming video short with Harry Shearer remains one of the funnier things I’ve ever seen. But as usual his character was so odd that trying to stretch it out any longer would have ruined it.
I didn’t see his SNL work for a long time, not in large doses, so that probably didn’t help. I saw more of his work on SCTV, where he never quite clicked for me compared to the rest of the cast.
Spend 4:39 watching this. It’s priceless.“You’re not mad at him!”
well, then there’s “yentl…”
I love Clifford, too, and that’s the perfect clip to summarize the film. I will always laugh when Short reaches for the damn dinosaur or at Grodin drawing back and then letting go with his total exasperation.
Grodin and Short should have been a legendary comedy duo for the ages. And I too, love Ms. Sarah Davis.
No, AVClub, I will not watch Clifford.
Here’s something I always wondered about this movie: was it sitting on shelf for a couple years before release? Ben Savage looks super young in his scenes; much younger than he ever did on Boy Meets World, which premiered a year before.
Clifford was shot in 1991 and sat on the shelves for 2-3 years, yes. Orion made it and they went bankrupt.
Classic Orion, always going bankrupt.
“Dead or alive … you’re coming with me.”
I saw this in the theater as a kid. My mom is a big Martin Short fan. I was probably 9 or 10, but remember almost nothing about it.
It took me to the third paragraph to realize this movie didn’t have a big red dog in it.
With his jacket in the header photo, I seriously thought for a second it was a weird Super Mario Bros-style live action take where they just made the character human instead of trying to portray a giant dog or spiky dragon.
Honestly, I think that’s the only reason I’ve seen this, as a desperate or half-assed video store choice where whatever adult supervision I was with and I assumed it *had* to have the dog as well.
It’s a very, very bizarre, often hilarious movie. And yes, it can get trying after a while.
The only thing I remember about this movie is thinking that it was the worst movie I had ever seen.
This movie is fucking awful. There is no rehabilitation for it, and I completely reject the concept of it as some lost, cult movie. I have watched it more times than anyone here because a video store coworker (who’s taste I usually trusted) would put it on all the time. And I am here to tell you this is a terrible, terrible film.This is no slight on Short, who is a fun, versatile performer in everything else. But casting an adult as a little boy is inherently terrible, and this movie is the ultimate proof (watching him play up to Steenburgen is creepy as fuck). Grodin is similarly burdened with material beneath him. They’re less a comic duo and more opposing poles of inhuman cruelty where the character sum is much less than the parts.
This is a hated-filled, miserable slog. It is clearly not trying to be a satire, so it gets no credit for subverting Problem Child-type plots. There is nothing pleasant in watching a grown man playing a child who hates all humanity torment any person, let alone their personality faults. This is a misanthropic story that asks us to massively suspend disbelief to try and enjoy watching adults torture each other in a fairy tale-like scenario. It’s essentially emotional torture porn without any social commentary. It makes Eli Roth look like Steven Spielberg.I hate this film so fucking much and I will brook no dissent on this issue. Any other films that I don’t like that people want to defend, I’ll give them a fair chance and enter a good-faith discussion of possible merits. This is the exception. Fuck Clifford.
I love how I’m not alone but reading through these comments feel like a bunch of Short apologists showing up and just going ‘hah! that was funny when I was 8 but I haven’t watched it since’ and literally everybody else going ‘Martin Short is a solid performer but this movie is evil incarnate and should be burned to send the demons back to the 9th circle of hell where they came from and here is my bullet point list of why this is true.’Erik Adams seems like a good man, now I know better.
I’ve never seen it, but this is one of the best scathing reviews I’ve ever read. Bravo, sir, bravo.
Is “Clifford” worse than Carvey vehicle “Master of Disguise”?
Oh yes. Master Of Disguise is not funny and has painful parts, but its too goofy and unserious to really be vicious. It’s never trying to be a social fable or psychological manipulation comedy, it’s just stupid. Dumb, condescending wannabe kids movies come and go; the anti-humanity darkness at the heart of Clifford is forever. Other films condemn humankind for our sins – war, poverty, prejudice, ignorance. Clifford is the rare film that hates people for trying to connect to each other, the one thing that makes life worth living. Master Of Disguise may be some people’s least favorite film, and I have no problem with that, everyone likes different things. But inside its awfulness, the badly-developed characters are at least somewhat human in their wanting to be loved, or to be talented, or to be rich, or for revenge, or for family. It’s not full of psychopaths who hate each other just for wanting to be loved.
I am sympathetic to your pain on repeated watchings at a video store, but this is not how most people will experience this film. It’s fascinating as a single watch.
Roger Ebert agreed with you; the entire concept is fundamentally flawed.“A movie like this is a deep mystery. It asks the question: What went wrong? “Clifford” is not bad on the acting, directing or even writing levels. It fails on a deeper level still, the level of the underlying conception. Something about the material itself is profoundly not funny. Irredeemably not funny, so that it doesn’t matter what the actors do, because they are in a movie that should never have been made.”
Damn, I wish I could write that well. Not fishing for compliments, Ebert was just the best.
Everybody Loves Raymond—in which every character hates each other and is cruel towards them—leaves me cold in a similar way.
Martin Short is the only performer I can think of who can get away with walking into a room to be interviewed, bask in the applause, go to sit down but stands up again to another round of applause.
“THANKS! for remembering!”
You mean like Gilda Radner did on “The Gary Shandling Show”?
I watched TGSS on-and-off but don’t remember seeing Radner on it. Was she one for just one episode or was she a recurring guest-star?Short has been doing this for years. He does it every time on every show and it always works.
It was on the sitcom style show he was doing under that name, not the talk show thing he was doing. It’s a famous clip done after she beat cancer for the first time.
Ok, but did she get that reaction once? Because Martin Short has been getting this reaction for years, on pretty much every talk show he appears on.
I haven’t seen this film yet but I’ve had a morbid curiosity about it ever since I read Nathan Rabin’s MYOF entry about it, which caused me to check out Roger Ebert’s review:To return to the underlying causes for the movie’s failure: What we have here is a suitable case for deep cinematic analysis. I’d love to hear a symposium of veteran producers, marketing guys and exhibitors discuss this film. It’s not bad in any usual way. It’s bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it’s based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe. The movie is so odd, it’s almost worth seeing just because we’ll never see anything like it again. I hope.So clearly this movie is insane in a new weird way. I haven’t even brought myself to view the clips in this article yet.
I think I saw it as a kid and didn’t like it at all. But I watched the clip at the end of the article and it was hilarious. I might have to give it another try.Also, that Ebert quote is outstanding.
I posted another clip from that review upthread. The entire review is one big “Why??”
“Pure Luck” was funny to me as a kid and I’m afraid to watch it again after 20+ years
I absolutely love this movie.That’s all. I just wanted to say that.
Somewhere, Tom Scharpling’s ears just pricked up.
At some point every movie no matter how mind-numbingly bad will get a revisionist take on the internet. After movies, we’ll get the revision takes on forms of torture. There’s an argument to be made for being drawn and quartered as a projection of the anxieties of being a working single mother.
I can barely tolerate children acting like movie children. The few minutes I could manage to sit through of this film were completely wasted. It came off as thinking of itself as a clever concept when it was just watching terrible people played by actors who have done much better work in situations that I could not be made to care about.
Short is considered to be a comedy genius, but as others said, he had “leading man only” disease after making it big on SNL where his talents were always much better suited for television or the stage. This happened to Dana Carvey too and some other SNL stars who wanted to be big in movies but just did not have the screen presence or characters that could make the jump from a SNL skit to movies. The comedians that often cannot make the jump to movies are usually great talents like Short, who are a jack of all trades types who do not have a “persona” that can sustain a two hour movie.Bill Murray was the “wisecraker”, Eddie Murphy always played the outsider who comes in and causes trouble, Chevy Chase the “smug jerk”, Steve Martin the clueless dolt..that sort of thing. The only one like Carvey or Short who made it in movies was really Mike Myers, who had a few great characters that he honed and developed to an extent he had a few movies worth of material for each of them.
I never liked Richard Kind for some reason. His exasperated dad at the beginning is super annoying and immediately tiresome. It’s like he started too high and had nowhere to go.
Spin City was my intro, and he was very well cast and written on that show. But otherwise his performance in A Serious Man is more in keeping with my general impression of his work.ETA: Holy shit, look at his IMDB! He must participate in more projects per year than anyone in Hollywood!
Short is like Mike Myers for me. Can be really funny, has real acting chops, but most of the time is doing a bit that makes sense only to him and he thinks he’s killing.
The part in Three Amigos! where he’s regaling a bunch of townsfolk with his Hollywood stories is kind of how I think of him in actuality.
The real difference to me is that Mike Myer’s bits have an undercurrent of “This is genius, and anyone who doesn’t think so is an idiot and a loser”. Whereas Martin Short’s bits are more, “I can’t help myself! Come along, or don’t, I won’t blame you either way! But it’d be great if you did!” I remember him on Letterman around 1990, telling Dave that he always wanted to do the kind of comedy where people would laugh, then immediately turn to the person next to them and say “Ex-ACT-ly”.
Yeah, I’d say I agree with that distinction.
Martin Short seems like a wonderful fellow and certainly has some talents…. But man, oh man, was he not suited to films at all when he wasn’t next to Steve Martin.
Martin Short is one of those people that is a hard sell to wide audiences. He’s brilliant. His stuff is consistently funny. BUT… The appeal of his comedy is also consistently very narrow. Even his biggest point back in the 80’s with Ed Grimley (Even with the animated show) it only worked as short bursts and not hours long stories.
I also think is penchant for vaudvillian performances a la Billy Crystal hasn’t aged well. He’s sort of stuck in the big, loud, broad mode and doesn’t seem interested in moving on.
yeah. Plus, his performance, while being broadly played, is also directed towards those who “Get it”. He kinda reminds me of (A bit less nutty) Andy Kaufman – comedy that you get if you already get. He’s brilliant and I actually like his stuff but there are times even I am left sitting there kinda tilting my head like a confused dog.
I love this movie too! Rewatched it last year for the first time in a while and still enjoyed the hell out of it.
I’m gonna be honest with you, Marge – I’ve always had an easier time buying Martin Short as a young boy in this film, and a MUCH tougher time believing Charles Grodin as an early 40s man wrestling with the decision to start a family. Grodin was almost 60 when “Clifford” was released.
Also, FUN FACT: “Clifford” was literally his last film role for a dozen years from 1994 to 2006, when he appeared in “The Ex” with Zach Braff and Amanda Peet. He had a brief whistle-stop to appear in three episodes of “The Charles Grodin Show” back in 1995-96, but it appears that “Clifford” basically broke his will to continue working in Hollywood.
Imagine my childhood disappointment when I rented this movie and found out it WASN’T about a giant red dog.