Film Appreciation - Jason and Freddy Were Kids Once, Too

Cody Hamman spells out some Film Appreciation for the 1992 slasher Mikey.

I was about nine years old when I rented the movie Mikey on VHS from a local video store. That would have been around the end of 1992, and even though I think I only watched Mikey one more time over the next twenty-seven years - and that time would have only been a "movie on in the background" sort of situation - my memories of the events in Mikey have remained vivid over the decades. That's because the movie, which was directed by Dennis Dimster-Denk from a screenplay by Jonathan Glassner, happens to be about a nine year old psychopath. I was the same age as the kid in this movie when I first saw it, and he is such an evil little bastard that I have never forgotten it.

I mean, how could you forget a movie that starts with a little kid causing his five-year-old adoptive sister to fall into a swimming pool and drown? Then that kid goes into the house and tosses a hairdryer into the bathtub with his adoptive mother. Then he waits for his adoptive father to come home so he can beat the guy to death with a baseball bat. That's the sort of thing that makes a mental impression.

Mikey is played by Brian Bonsall, who I recognized as adorable little Andy Keaton from the '80s sitcom Family Ties. There is nothing adorable about Bonsall in this movie, though. Mikey can pretend to be a sweet little angel, but he can't keep up that facade for long before revealing himself to be a complete psychopath. The spelling bee champ is also cold-blooded killer who will murder anyone who he feels has wronged him, hasn't shown him enough attention, or stands in the way of him achieving a goal.

With his adoptive family dead and his biological parents unfit to care for him, Mikey - who is not suspected of committing the murders - ends up being adopted by Neil and Rachel Trenton, played by character actor John Diehl and Mimi Craven, who was recently divorced from Wes Craven when this movie went into production. They give him a good home, and set him up in a bedroom where he has the same colorful dinosaur sheets that I had when I was a child.

Mikey makes quick friends with next door neighbor Ben (Whitby Hertford of A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child)... and then develops his first crush when he gets a look at Ben's teenage sister Jessie (Josie Bissett). Mikey's crush on Jessie ends up being at the center of the movie, and don't let the fact that the kid is nine make you think he can't be an obsessive creep. He films Jessie through her bedroom window, much like he films some of the murders he commits so he can rewatch them over and over, he tries to convince her that he's the sweetest guy around, he wants her to love only him.

His pursuit of Jessie is complicated due to her already having an age appropriate boyfriend, so Mikey has to figure out a way to get this guy out of her life. Even if he has to kill Jessie's cat and stick the corpse in the path of the guy's truck tire so he can frame him for the death of the feline.

Mikey tricks Neil and Rachel into thinking he's the perfect child, but Rachel's best friend Shawn (Ashley Laurence of Hellraiser) isn't convinced. And since Shawn also happens to be Mikey's fourth grade teacher, she has plenty of opportunity to evaluate the kid and find out what's really going on with him. She does jump to the conclusion that Mikey has issues a little too early - one look at a drawing he has made, which isn't far off from the sort of drawings I made in my youth, in tribute to the horror and action movies I was (and am) a fan of, and she's already thinking he might be a psychopath. But that puts her on the right track.

Bonsall probably would have been nine or ten when he made this movie, but having a kid in the lead didn't cause the filmmakers to pull any punches. There's a reason why slasher icons are name-checked in the film's tagline; "Remember, Jason and Freddy were kids once, too." That's because Mikey is a full-on slasher that shows Bonsall dispatching people with various weapons and often dropping a quip about death while doing so. It's easy to imagine that a whole franchise could have been built around this character. Through a series of sequels, we could have watched Mikey grow up while also continuing to expand his body count.

Mikey is not a pleasant movie, but a cool cast brought this troubling story to life. In addition to the actors already mentioned, there's Lyman Ward (from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge and best known as Ferris Bueller's dad) as an associate of Shawn's, and Mark Venturini from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning and The Return of the Living Dead briefly shows up as a detective.

Disturbing though it is, I liked the movie when I was Mikey's age, it stuck with me over the years, and when I watched it again in 2020 I still liked it. It's a great slasher that deserves the place it has had in my mind for almost thirty years now.