Since I currently reside in the throes of a strangely productive mid-life crisis, I’ve been cherry-picking near-forgotten media from decades past, titles that, at one time or another, made some kind of an impact on lil ole me, enough so that I’m now daring to go back, to locate the best versions possible, and revisit some old school flicks from the ole wonder years, all with the perspective of age and wisdom (*snorts sarcastically*).
And here we land on another one.
I first saw D.A.R.Y.L. at an elementary school buddy’s birthday sleepover party in 1986, where it was double billed with the just-released on VHS blockbuster Top Gun. For movie nerd me, this was all fine and dandy, especially since that was the first time I was ever exposed to the iconic works of director Tony Scott, with Top Gun having blown my little military aircraft-loving mind. But…D.A.R.Y.L., which we watched first, also made something of an impression. Now, since that night, I’ve seen Top Gun numerous times, enough that I can recite whole sections of dialogue with no effort, but D.A.R.Y.L., I’ve only ever seen that one time. I saw it, I liked it, and I never circled back. It’s that simple.
So, in my recent quests for physical media, this title sprang to mind and I looked into it, finding only a UK release Blu ray for a decent price. So, I gave in to temptation (I do that too often), and scored a copy.
Last week…it arrived.
It was with some apprehension that I slipped the disk into my region-free player, as I was fully prepared for the nostalgia glasses to be punched from my face by some horrible low-quality Mac and Me-style bullshit that would have me wanting to smack the shit out of 9 year old me for having such piss-poor taste in movies.
But…I had a really fun time revisiting this one. So much that I’d completely forgotten came flooding back and more than once, I was pleasantly surprised by certain non-PC and adult choices this ‘kids’ movie chose to make.
For those who don’t know, D.A.R.Y.L. opens with a scientist being pursued at high speed by a mysterious helicopter through a forested mountain area. Along the way, he stops to let a 10 year old boy in formal attire out, to scramble into the woods, before continuing on as a diversion. The boy, confused and scared, is found by an elderly couple, who then get him to a social worker. This boy goes by ‘Daryl’ and he’s played by Barret Oliver, who people will probably recognize from The Neverending Story (1984), Cocoon (1985) and the sequel Cocoon: The Return (1988). He’s soon put into foster care with the Richardson’s, ‘Andy’ (Michael McKean) and ‘Joyce’ (Mary Beth Hurt), who yearn for a child of their own. As he falls into life in the suburbs, he makes friends with a destined-for-prison kid improbably named ‘Turtle Fox’ (Danny Corkill) and his probably-promiscuous older sister ‘Sherie’ aka ‘Hookie’.
Soon he gets pulled into the welcoming suburban fold and inadvertently becomes the secret weapon for the local little league baseball team, as he seems to have a ‘natural’ talent for picking up concepts and adaptation with astonishing speed and acuity. Soon these eccentricities start being noticed and questions start being asked, but just as life is taking on some form of normalcy and acceptance for ‘Daryl’; a couple claiming to be his parents appear and he sadly goes with them. It’s then revealed that ‘Daryl’ is the prototype for a military project to create the perfect spy, grown in a lab with a highly augmented brain. The couple, who are actually two of the doctors overseeing the Data Analyzing Robotic Youth Lifeform project, ‘Dr. Jeffrey Stewart’ (Josef Sommer) and ‘Dr. Ellen Lamb’ (Kathryn Walker), are captivated by the effect that the unintended Real-World exposure had on ‘Daryl’, seeing signs of genuine feeling and curiosity emerging from his time with the ‘Richardsons’, cutting through the programming and humanizing him. The military, however, see things differently and deem the project a failure, ordering an immediate shut-down and destruction of assets, including ‘Daryl’ himself. And thus begins the chase to free ‘Daryl’ and return him to the people who care the most. People die and shit gets destroyed.
Let’s go.
So, as is my way, I fired this sucker into the player (within an hour of tearing the packaging off, fiend that I am), grabbed my pen and paper… and hit PLAY.
Here lie them scribbles…
-Awesome intro. Always remembered. I always appreciate a solid cold opening to a movie and D.A.R.Y.L. has a good one, with a non-descript government car racing along rough logging roads at high speed, with an aggressive helicopter in hot pursuit. The way this chase scene ends is the first indicator that the 80’s treated us kids just a bit differently, with *SPOILERS* the desperate doctor mashing the pedal to the medal, sending the car through a cliff-side road partition to pancake with shattering impact in the shallow river far below, obviously killing the dude. I remembered it as being badass and shocking…and watching it again 35+ years later confirmed that it is, in fact, badass and shocking.
-I wonder what happened to Barret Olivier(?) I looked him up. He quit acting in his late teens and went on to become a strangely esoteric photographer and teacher…with dreadlocks. There’s something questionable about his look, in the more recent pics I saw. But hey…each to their own and good on him for pursuing that which he was genuinely passionate about.
-Music is schmaltzy. It is. It really, really is. While some is passable ‘action movie’ music for the time, for key scenes, some of it is pure 80’s day-time soap opera-sounding bullshit, usually revolving around the sugary interactions of the foster family.
-Turtle! I forgot about that little bastard! As noted, I’d totally forgotten about this side-kick, comic relief character, as enthusiastically portrayed by Danny Corkill (another budding child actor who threw in the towel in the late 80’s) and his intro, with his piggy little face mashed up against a screen door in Close Up, had me laughing out loud. Then his dialogue begins…and I was laughing all over again, sometimes at Corkill’s delivery and sometimes at the PG-13+ level crassness he would casually spew.
-Surprisingly UnPC humour. As already scribbled, some of the humor, both dialogue and situational, caught me off-guard, especially when I considered how today’s overly sensitive and overly PC society would undoubtedly view it. I suspect the constant referrals to ‘Turtles’ sister being a ‘hooker in training’, for example, wouldn’t have them rolling in the aisles today. But I laughed…and I’m not sorry.
-80’s kid language is gold. Turtle rocks! There’s more of that right there. Damn kids and their swear words, BMX’s and bubble gum!! Movies of the era weren’t afraid to acknowledge how us kids actually talked…and we were rude little shits out there on the playground! So, seeing movies like this, The Goonies (1985), Explorers (1985), Stand By Me (1986) and The Lost Boys (1987), among others, that openly embraced that real-world aspect of life at the age, are always fun.
-Dialogue is a mixed bag. Performance-wise, some was delivered well and with surprising gravitas…while some was right back to soap opera level stiltedness, with hints of cringe.
-Some helpful larceny. ATM. ‘Daryl’ does some impossible secret spy robot shit to an ATM outside a local bank, button mashing until he somehow adds over $1 million to the Dad’s account, just from thin air (that’s a friggin trick I’d like to learn!). Sometimes, you just have to go along with the dumb shit for the story to tell its story.
-Cheezy music a disservice. As already bitched about, a lot of the score is awful, overly sentimental-sounding garbage that sounds like it’s been lifted from some non-descript music library too-boring-yet-over-the-top for even the soft-core porn of the day.
-Gee, do you think this impromptu flight tutoring will come in handy? After the two doctors take possession of ‘Daryl’, they all head to the local airfield, where a Lear jet waits. ‘Daryl’, having never been on a plane, is fascinated and asks to talk to the pilot, who then proceeds to give the 10-year-old espionage super-weapon a very detailed spiel on how to fly a jet. Do ya think foreshadowing, perhaps?
-Interesting, early take on AI. And they even name drop the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ at one point, discussing ‘Daryl’s potential and capabilities. Strangely prophetic, given the sudden influx of AI-related content choking everything up, and the potential for AI-related threat rearing its digital head now-a-days.
-Cool car chase. That. Right there. I always appreciate destruction in my car chases and director Simon Wincer (who has a surprisingly varied and notable filmography and should be counted with great Aussie directors like George Miller, Peter Weir and Russell Mulcahy) brought some cool sequences, with several involving cars flying around and smashing on things at high speed, to the extended escape scene that kicks off Act Three.
-SR-71 Blackbird. Any aircraft nerd paying attention in the glorious 1980’s knew about this awe-inspiring aircraft, at the time the fastest military jet on the planet, used for high-altitude recon of all those pesky commies that were lurking everywhere back in the day. Some of the model work / compositing is wonky, with heavy matte-lines and odd motion marring some shots, but for the age group this flick is ultimately aimed at, it’s still an exciting sequence, however impossible.
–Oh, of course, the walkie talkie happens to be on. Even when I was a kid, this always bugged me. It always seemed like kids in the movies of the period, those who were equipped with those trusty walkie talkies, could just grab it in the middle of the night and radio whatever little buddy of theirs that had the companion radio, and that little buddy would just wake up to the scratchy little voice that would appear out of nowhere in their room. But here’s the thing…batteries are / were not cheap and in order for a radio call to get instantly received, it would mean that the walkie talkie would have to be left on, all the time. Not likely to ever be the case. It’s a nit-pick detail but it’s one that has long stood out to me.
–Hilariously saccharine ending. Almost cringey. Of course, there’s the obligatory happy ending and it’s so wholesome and sugary that it had ‘cringe’ bubbling up from the depths. Given the genre and intended age group, it was inevitable that we would get what we got, but that doesn’t change the fact that the tooth-rotting sweetness, to me, always rings overly false or cartoonishly whimsical.
-Better than I expected. It would appear that I had prepared myself well for this one, going in not trusting my memory or the faint impression that stuck around since that one viewing back in 1986. I genuinely enjoyed revisiting D.A.R.Y.L. all these years later, and feel that it still has entertainment value today, especially given its oddly timed theme of the dangers of AI and the notion of what makes a human a human. Kind of like Blade Runner…for kids.
All in all, I’m glad I went back and revisited this key title from my childhood. I expected the worst and, in the end, actually had a fun time checking this one out again. In fact, I would wager that there’s a good chance I may actually go back and happily rewatch it again, someday down the road (a buddy of mine hasn’t seen it and is curious, so…). The 1980’s were a great time for youth-related movies, of all genres, and D.A.R.Y.L. deserves to stand alongside many of the upper-tier titles of the time. It seems to be a largely overlooked title, but I don’t think it deserves to be toeing the line of cinematic obscurity. If you’re a fan of the ‘Amblin’-style flicks of the 80’s, you’re the first group I’d be recommending this to, as you’ll be well-served in both entertainment and nostalgia value. Beyond that, a couple key complaints aside, it’s a well-made oddly mature (at times) ‘what if’ story that I think certain movie-going kids and adults today could still have fun with.
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