Star Kid Reviews

A kiddie sci-fi picture without a mean bone in its body, this sweetly sentimental morality tale with monsters will entertain preteens without making parents want to wash its mouth out with soap. Small-town 12-year-old Spencer (Joseph Mazzelo) just hit a rough patch on the road to adolescence: His widowed, workaholic dad (Richard Gilliland) is never home, teenage sister Stacey (Ashlee Levitch) is obsessed with boys, the school bully (Joey Simmrin) is out to get him, and he breaks into a mortifying cold sweat in the presence of Michelle (Lauren Eckstrom), the pretty classmate who shows every sign of being willing to go on a date with him, if he could just work up the nerve to speak to her. Then along comes Cy, a cybernetic battle suit from space who lands in the local junkyard and is definitely the most kid-friendly thing to hit Crystal Bluff since Ben & Jerry's. Yes, Spencer and Cy's adventures pack a heavy-duty family values message, but it's not heavy going. The bad guy from space -- the Broodwarrior, a slimy behemoth that keeps pulling things off its own spiny body to use as weapons -- is a pretty gross piece of work, in the best possible sense of that term. And you have to like a movie in which the science-class tarantula is named "Leo G."