MovieChat Forums > Joey (1985) Discussion > very heavily Spielberg influenced

very heavily Spielberg influenced

posted 15 years ago by lostboy87
2 replies | jump to latest

Watching this for the first time since i was a kid and cant believe how Spielberg like this film is.
The music,the atmosphere,the effects,the lighting and the kids.
This is almost like and F'd up version of E.T even with the moon shot from outside the window and the classic Spielberg absent dad and family troubles.Joey is also very similar looking to Henry Thomas who played Eliot in the film.
Also this film is similar in allot of ways to poltergeist.The toys coming to life and the investigators turning up at the house which also mirrors when the scientist turn up to collect E.T.Also the scene where the mother is walking clutching the phone just after she has been told that her son is dead,is very similar to when the mother in poltergeist is pining over her daughter.
Even one shot (that made me laugh out loud) was a blatant rip off of the Brody shot in Jaws when hes sat at his chair on the beach! If you dont know which part i mean its just after the milk moving scene at the table with his mother.It shows the red telephone ringing at the end of the hallway.
This film is riddled with 80's cheese and the acting is terrible but this is still a magical lost gem.Joeys bedroom makes me wish i was a kid again and everything in there would be worth a small fortune now.
Love it!!

"I mean i just wanted to leave,you know my apartment,meet a nice girl and now ive gotta die for it"

[–] TalesfromTheCryptfan 15 years ago

Well the movie was originally going to be an Airplane style spoof of Spielberg and Lucas movies according to Emmerich. But the producers insisted that this movie needs to be a fantasy-drama rather then a comedy-parody so Emmerich got to that route and kept the Lucas-Spielberg parody aspects to it.

I think it's a nice homage with a bit of a dark fairy tale thrown into it and this one is one of my faves, it did scared me as a little one though. Personally i thought the boy who played Joey did a great acting job, whatever happened to him? he was quite talented for a boy his age and had a promising career.

"Oh wow, good Nyborg"-Heavy Metal.

[–] danixdefcon5 14 years ago

When I first watched this movie, I catched it on cable when it was already past the half of the movie. I first thought it was a German-dubbed E.T. until I realized that the movie wasn't E.T., then I thought "well, probably a German version of ET" but that also went away when I found out that the setting was definitely the US and not Germany. The rest of the movie made me pin this like something that would come out after mixing ET with Poltergeist. I still wondered why everyone was speaking German, now thanks to IMDb I know that the film was actually a West German movie filmed in the US. (Huh?)