It's Popcorn's 1st birthday this week! It's been a whole year since I started this project as a way to watch more movies, but have something creative come out of it, after being very much in the middle of lockdown thanks to that pandemic... and since we started a year ago with Piranhaconda things have developed slightly as I now also cover 'free-to-watch' (FTW) b-movies that you can find floating around on the internet somewhere if you look hard enough as part of FTW week, and also more obscure, more heavily criticized Disney movies like; Home on the Range, The Secret of the Magic Gourd, and Disney Channel Original Movies, like last months; Genius as part of Disney Week, and this weeks movie choice: The Thirteenth Year. A movie about a boy who... suddenly develops scales and fins and can breathe underwater... ok... finds itself in that latter category.
Whit and Sharon Griffin (Dave Coulier and Lisa Stahl Sullivan) somehow find a baby on board their boat and their first response is to take him home with them and keep him rather than, y'know inform the authorities or anything... but anyway 13 years later water baby has all grown up into teenager Cody (Chez Starbuck - which incredibly is not a made up name...) who after almost missing the ferry to the mainland, still manages to make it to the finals of a swimming competition to... come in second... great job. But apparently Samantha (Courtnee Draper) still thinks he's a winner cos she snubs the gold medallist to hitch a ride home with Cody instead. Later in class Cody gets paired with stereotypical nerd Jess Wheatley (Justin Jon Ross) on a project for marine biology and is kind of a dick to him, but invites him to his 13th birthday party nonetheless, only to then be a bit of a dick some more... anyway, at the party when Cody leans in for a kiss with Samantha, they both get a little electric shock...? and Cody has been getting crazy thirsty lately, and later that night he has a really intense dream about swimming underwater... what could this all mean?... At breakfast that morning, after destroying his alarm clock with an electric shock, Cody discovers the orange juice carton now sticks to his fingers, and after going to meet Jess he discovers scales have started to grow on his hands! Later, Cody goes to Jess's... house I guess, which is actually a boat yard where he meets Jess's Dad; Big John (Brent Briscoe) who is obsessed with mermaids after seeing one almost exactly 13 years ago (see where we're going with this yet?...). Convinced that something is wrong with him, Cody sees a Doctor who diagnoses him as going through puberty... because yeah we all develop scales and the ability to climb walls when we go through puberty... to the movies credit Cody thinks that's nonsense as well and after convincing Jess to run some tests on him and look into things with his dad, Jess tells Cody that he thinks he is a Merman. Confronting his adopted parents (who actually did report finding Cody to the police so fair enough), Cody asks them for help tracking down his real parents but instead they just make him promise not to go into the water, which is a bit difficult when you are in the State Finals swimming competition... so Cody ignores them and goes for a swim in the open ocean anyway, only to emerge struggling for breath and with fins growing from his arms which he has to hide from a curious Samantha later on the beach. Disobeying his parents again Cody rocks up at the State Finals and can't be convinced not to swim even by Jess, but when he emerges from the pool after scoring first place, a gold medal and a new record time, Cody's arms have developed fins again, which he only just manages to hide from the crowd and from his rival Sean, but not from the binoculars of Big John... and not from Samantha who, later back at Cody's sees his arms and freaks out. The following day at school goes badly, and in a spontaneous moment in the evening Cody jumps into the ocean for a swim where he encounters a mermaid, and his biological Mother (Stephanie Chantel Durelli) but the reunion is interrupted when they are spotted by Big John who vows to Jess that he will catch him a mermaid! Later the following day, at the Cove, Cody and Samantha make up but when Cody's biological mer-mum appears Cody begins to transform and after Samantha runs to get help Cody is captured by Big John and Jess, who uses Cody as err... bait... to catch his mer-mum. Dropping a net on her to catch her. But Jess wants nothing to do with this and jumps in the water cutting open the net to free the mermaid, but becoming entangled in the net is dragged deeper into the sea and drowns. Cody dives in to rescue him and resuscitate him, finally being joined by Cody's adoptive parents and by Samantha who arrive just in time to see Cody's mer-mum in the dock. Deciding Cody has to join her Cody's mum convinces him to go and he jumps into the ocean, fully transforming into a merman and swims off with his mother into the sunset.
This was good! I enjoyed it. Unlike Genius last month, this genuinely felt like it was a movie and not just a feature long episode of a TV show. It was clear that a good amount of thought, of planning, of effort went into this movie. It wasn't perfect, not by a stretch, and it was obviously produced on a reduced budget and it was so obviously a made for TV movie, but those shortcomings aside I feel like they did a good job here to make as good a movie as they could with those limited resources and went that extra mile to make it a worthwhile watch.
I'm reliably informed that this was Chez Starbuck's first movie, and he is stiff, and wooden in a fair sprinkling of places, but he equally makes up for it with some really good work in the emotional scenes and just generally in parts when he's called upon. There is no doubting that he's green (excuse the fish pun...) in parts but he wasn't so amateur as to damage the entire production. He at least doesn't come across like he's trying too hard, which is a danger when an actor in a movie tries to overact to cover up their shortcomings, and I thought he did a decent job here as the main lead.
My perhaps only minor criticism is that going in, the movie is labelled as a "Comedy" movie, and whilst it did have it's minor moments that were amusing; little puns, little gags, it was relatively short on the comedy front. It wasn't a laugh out loud movie. It was entertaining in it's own ways but it wasn't entertaining for comedic reasons and this is certainly more of a fantasy movie than anything else. I don't feel like a lack of comedy really hampers it, and it might have taken it to that next level if they have managed to up that comedy threshold but labelling the movie as a comedy is just not true.
Aside from that minor detail, everything else was more than competent for the level of production. It certainly felt more like it was shot like an actual cinematic production rather than a TV episode, but I'm only x2 films deep into my DCOM experience, so maybe Genius is the exception and all the others will be shot more like movies too? The soundtrack was very basic, mostly just whimsical background music, or more up tempo stock beats when the occasion called for it but it was fitting enough for what it was accompanying and didn't stand out as being completely inappropriate or just downright unsuitable. The cinematography and special effects in general were decent enough. With a bit more budget they could have perhaps showcased Cody's transformation a little bit better, especially in the final scenes, but with what they had to work with, I feel they did a passable enough job and it didn't feel like an amateur production watching it.
This is only my second dip of the toe into DCOM's, and was something I wanted to get into when I first started Disney Week, and I didn't want to compare this one too heavily to Genius, as in reality they don't have any other similarities other than both being Disney movies, but this was a much better movie by a err... nautical mile... if you like. Everything about this felt so much more fresh, more original. They could have just re-hashed Little Mermaid but switched the gender roles around, but instead they went for a new storyline, a new narrative, and produced an actual movie. Not an extended episode of a TV show. And it really paid off here. I would watch this again, and I would watch this with my kids, if I had any, most definitely. Not a perfect example of cinema, no way, but a competently produced, enjoyable little movie. 3 out of 5.
