Years before Roland Emmerich
dethroned Irwin Allen as the undisputed king of big budgeted disaster porn, the
German born filmmaker started out in 1985 with the foundation of Centropolis
Film Productions (now Centropolis Entertainment) with his sister and producing
partner Ute Emmerich and the production of his first major motion picture, the
English language science fiction thriller Joey.
Renamed Making Contact in the US before excising some twenty minutes of
footage and completely rescoring the whole thing, the film concerns a young boy
played by Joshua Morell who comes to believe he has made contact with his long
deceased father while fending off a demonically possessed ventriloquist dummy
which summons a myriad of other demons threatening his family and soon mankind
itself. It’s up to the boy to take on a
telekinetic battle with the demons in the spirit world.
Clearly somewhere between
attempting to do Steven Spielberg with heavy doses of Poltergeist thrown in along with some metaphysical lunacy ala The Manitou, Joey aka Making Contact isn’t
so much a “good” movie per se as it is a curiosity for fans of forgotten 80s
films and disaster fans keen on digging out the stepping stones that brought
Emmerich to where he is today. While
moviegoers are undeniably divided with mostly negative reviews of his films
dogging his filmography, it’s interesting to see the future Irwin Allen
starting out in the film business trying to emulate the filmmaker who was all
the rage at the time of the film’s inception.
Tying to come across this
film hasn’t been easy with a few remaining New World Pictures VHS copies
floating around and the long out-of-print Anchor Bay DVD exceeding the $200
range in some instances. Thankfully the
good folks at Kino Lorber will be putting this scalping collecting business to
bed with a remastered blu-ray containing both the original German and reedited
American versions of the film.
Slated for May 9th,
2017, fans of Emmerich, forgotten schlock and pretty anything just plain 80s
right now should rejoice at the announcement of the reissue of this long
thought dead and buried knockoff. If
nothing else, it should give junkies of the New World/Vestron era of VHS driven
science-fiction horror something to chew on.
Who would have thought our generation’s Irwin Allen tried his hand at
becoming the next Spielberg?
- Andrew Kotwicki