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May 09, 2011dmarkwind rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a quarter of a century since Harry and the Hendersons first came out. It still holds up as a simultaneously funny and touching film. The setup is that a family goes camping and literally runs into bigfoot on the way home. Thinking the creature is dead, dad, played by John Lithgow, takes the body home expecting to get rich from his discovery. Of course, Harry’s not really dead and when he comes around in the suburban setting, he wrecks havoc, while at the same time befriending the family and putting them in greater touch with their own humanity. The public doesn’t want to hear anything except that the giant creature is a manical monster and there’s also an obsessed hunter on Harry’s trail, thus making it a race to get him back where he belongs. A lot of the credit for making this work has to go to Kevin Peter Hall, the seven foot-two-inch actor under the makeup who gives the titular character his humanity. Hall was also seen as the mutant bear in Prophecy and the alien of the first two Predator movies. This film hints at what he might have been able to go on to if he had hadn’t died in 1991 of AIDS he contracted from a contaminated blood transfusion he received after a car accident. Some credit also has to go to Rick Baker’s creature makeup, which won an Oscar for this film. There’s also a great visual gag at the very end which always impressed me. Lithgow, who is thin and bears a full head of hair, is terrific here, as is the entire cast. The almost omnipresent Don Ameche shows up as an anthropologist so wounded by his own search for bigfoot years earlier that he’s reluctant to believe again that the creature could be real. Director William Dear, who went on to make Wild America and the 1994 remake of Angels in the Outfield, brings a E.T-ish approach and it works. The extras on the 25th anniversary disc aren’t great, but there is a making of featurette as well as more recent comments from the director. My only complaint (and I can’t believe I’m writing this) is that the environmental message is almost too heavy-handed but it’s done with a lot of humor. I’d definitely recommend this one for the whole family.