Slappy and the Stinkers Reviews

Kids still young enough to be hooked on Saturday morning cartoons may enjoy this self-consciously cliché-ridden kiddie flick, but it will be torture for their adult chaperones. It's summer session at La La Land's snooty Dartmoor Academy, and pretentious headmaster Morgan Brinway (B.D. Wong, delivering a truly embarrassing performance) is boring his charges -- including the troublesome scholarship kids he's dubbed the "Stinkers" -- with an opera appreciation class. Sonny (Joseph Ashton), Domino (Gary LeRoi Gray) and the rest of the Stinkers decide to make a "rocket chair" and raid the shed belonging to spacey groundskeeper Roy (Bronson Pinchot). Wacky complications ensue in the form of the first of several sequences involving the school of physical comedy popularly described as "over-the-top, cartoon-like violence." On the verge of being expelled, the Stinkers take a field trip to an aquarium and decide to free a sea lion named Slappy. But it just so happens that master animal thief Boccoli (Sam McMurray) wants to steal Slappy and sell him to a Bulgarian circus, presumably the sea lion equivalent of a fate worse than death. Even for an unambitious kid pic, the plotting and dialogue are leaden, and the filmmakers never seem to know what to do with Slappy. The good-natured pinniped has surprisingly little screen time considering that his name's in the title, and appears to be having fun only when snarfing slimy raw fish, which may provide the kids with some gross-out laughs. Our recommendation: Wait till it's on video, rent it for them and leave the room.