Tomb

Not all chick movies are the same. Some have unexpected elements that look like they belong in a completely different film. Huge spoilers are coming up, but don’t worry about it unless you’re planning on watching a bunch of romantic comedy-dramas from the ‘90s soon.

• A huge military attack helicopter that kills people: Home Fries (1998) — when you see the trailer, you think you pretty much know the whole story. Sweet little Drew Barrymore is pregnant, single and working at the drive-thru window at a rural burger joint. Luke Wilson is the shy, awkward hunk who falls in love with her, and will no doubt be helping her to raise her baby by film’s end. Seems fairly straightforward, and indeed, that’s how the movie starts out... at least for the first two minutes. In the third minute, when Drew’s baby daddy drives away from the Burger-Matic after chickening out of making an honest woman of her, he gets attacked by a state-of-the-art military chopper. The two helicopter pilots wear nightvision goggles in order to zero in on their prey in the dark and release a volley of machine gun fire which causes the victim to suffer a fatal heart attack right then and there. One of the pilots is Wilson, who then gets a job at Drew’s burger joint in order to make sure that none of the employees heard any incriminating evidence of the crime over their drive-thru headsets. (If they were worried about evidence and witnesses, they probably should have used a less flashy murder weapon.) The romance angle then proceeds as planned, with the added twist that Wilson’s family are all psychopathic killers with access to heavily armed military aircraft.

If that helicopter had been in the trailers, guys would have been dragging their girlfriends to the theatre to see Home Fries, instead of the other way around.

• Supernatural possession: Prelude to a Kiss (1992) — there are no supernatural elements in the poster for Prelude to a Kiss, just a simple shot of stars Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan sharing a tender moment, their eyes closed, faces touching. For roughly half of the movie, everything is perfectly normal. Baldwin and Ryan meet, fall in love, get married and see their relationship gradually deteriorate. That’s when the film hits us with a completely unexpected revelation — Ryan magically switched bodies with a creepy old man on their wedding day. Baldwin now has to deal not only with the fact that his bride of a few weeks or months is actually an elderly dude, but also that the real Ryan is somewhere out there trapped in a frail old male body, and is possibly lost to him forever. It reminded me a lot of I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), a film with a similar plot and themes, but with an ad campaign as deceptively lurid as the one for Prelude to a Kiss was understated.

• Baby murder: The Joy Luck Club (1993) — baby murder?! Seriously?! Man, even the original The Hills Have Eyes (1977) didn’t go that far. But here it is; on-camera and everything. One of the female characters has a jerk of a husband who cheats on her shamelessly. He has great affection for their infant child, and for nothing and nobody else. His big scene looks like an acting challenge in which the guy has only 30 seconds to make his wife want to kill their baby. He does a hell of a job. Lurching home obnoxious and drunk, he drags his latest mistress out in front of his humiliated wife, shoves her (the wife) around and makes little cooing noises at the baby before leaving again, presumably crossing “be a total asshole” off his list of things to do for the day. The furious wife gives the tot a bath, and she allows the baby to drown as an unconscious act of defiance.

Okay, so it’s not exactly hurling the child from a rooftop, but still, for an über-chick-flick like this, it’s pretty hardcore.

• Cryonic freezing and revival: Late for Dinner (1991) — this film is largely concerned with a man who suddenly returns to his wife after a 29-year absence and tries to win her back. That’s not particularly unexpected chick flick material. What is unusual is the reason for his disappearance — he’s been cryogenically frozen by a mad scientist.

Uh... yeah. “Now honey, I know you’re not going to believe this....”

It’s the shift in tone that makes this movie so weird. It’s all earnest realism apart from the cryonics bit, and the middle section plays like a wacky comedy, as the thawed-out husband and his similarly thawed-out mentally challenged brother-in-law try to buy a burger. They’re expecting 1962 prices, not realizing that they’ve been frozen for three decades. Then the guy tracks down his now-retirement-age wife and woos her anew.

Interestingly, the only other film W.D. Richter ever directed was The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984).

• Cannibalism: Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) — Yep, cannibalism in a chick flick. If you haven’t seen the film, you probably don’t believe me. At one point in the story, one of the sassy female leads helps her best friend by killing the friend’s no-good husband. That’s what friends are for. Of course they have to dispose of the body, so they cook it and serve it to the unwitting customers at the Whistle Stop Cafe; mostly to an unpleasant detective who is investigating the husband’s disappearance. Serves him right for being rude to the waitress.