Clifford (1994)

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

We lost the great Charles Grodin this week, but his underrated work will live on in classics like MIDNIGHT RUN, THE HEARTBREAK KID and…

Director: Paul Flaherty
Stars: Martin Short, Charles Grodin, Mary Steenburgen

Hell hath no fury like a psychotic 10 year old who just wants to go to Dinosaur World.

As a parent to a kid obsessed with movies, my mom got dragged to a lot of films she had no interest in, and to her credit, she always supported my burgeoning cinephile habit without complaint. The sole exception to this, and the only film I remember her ever actively hating and walking out on, was CLIFFORD. She said it gave her nightmares and she forbade me from quoting it or ever watching it again around her. I brought it up to her this week when I started writing this, 25 years later, and she said the thought of Martin Short as a demented child still haunts her.

I have no idea why my mom thought this movie was disturbing.

And it seems like my mom was not alone in her harsh assessment, given this film’s chilly reception amongst critics and audiences upon its release. It ended up on numerous "Worst Of" lists, including a famously harsh thumbs down by both Siskel and Ebert. Martin Short and Charles Grodin never really had any leading roles after this. The director didn’t make another movie ever again. And the writers, in a stunning act of foresight, took their names off the movie before it even came out.

It sort of makes sense. CLIFFORD is an actively weird and transgressive film across the board. It’s clearly presented as a children’s movie thanks to the storybook opening credits and bookend segments that position the story as a morality tale with an important message for kids. However, everything in-between is a dark, dark comedy that seems wildly inappropriate for young audiences, unless you’re trying to show your kids a guidebook for how to be deranged criminals with no regard for civil society or human life.

Watching CLIFFORD now it’s easier to see what they were going for and in that sense it does feel somewhat underrated and deserving of its recent cult following. On the surface, this is a movie about a super annoying kid doing terrible things, but there’s a lot of great stuff happening under the hood. The performances are stellar, the jokes land more often than not, and the tone strikes the right balance of unhinged without going too overboard—all ingredients perfect for what the movie is trying to achieve. In fact, I’d venture that any of the reasons people seem to hate CLIFFORD are actually things the cast and crew set out to do on purpose and they do them well.

Fred Savage: Plays a boy listening to the title story in THE PRINCESS BRIDE.
Ben Savage: Plays a boy listening to the title story in CLIFFORD.

Clifford Daniels is a spoiled, hyperactive little boy with a genius-level IQ who uses all of his intelligence to annoy and manipulate people in to doing whatever he wants without care for consequences. Essentially, he’s a four-foot-tall sociopath whose only friend is plastic dinosaur toy named Steffen. Perhaps that’s why Clifford’s sole motivation in life is to visit Dinosaur World, a Jurassic-themed amusement park in Los Angeles. When the movie opens, we find Clifford on a plane to Hawaii, sabotaging the engines to force an emergency landing at LAX so he can make his parents to take him to Dinosaur World.

Understandably, this seems to be the last straw for Clifford’s mom and dad, who decide to go to Hawaii and dump their son on his Uncle Martin, who lives nearby and is conveniently trying to prove to his girlfriend Sarah (an under-utilized Mary Steenburgen) how great he can be with kids. Clifford is thrilled when Martin agrees to take him to Dinosaur World and then is equally upset the next day when Martin has an emergency at work and cancels their trip. The remaining hour or so of this movie sees Clifford punish and torture his Uncle in an escalating series of life-ruining pranks, misdemeanors and felonies—all in the name of trying to get to Dinosaur World (and sometimes just for no reason). These include, but are not limited to:

Numerous counts of property theft, including stealing someone’s dog from the airport, which immediately runs away and is never seen/mentioned again
Taking control of a moving car and threatening to crash it until he gets chocolate
Extorting/kidnapping a child in a gas station bathroom
Embarrassing his uncle at an important social event by tricking him into drinking pure Tobasco sauce and putting on lipstick instead of chapstick
Altering a recording of his uncle to make it sound like he’s calling in a bomb threat on City Hall, which gets him publicly arrested
Pretending to run away to San Francisco and tricking his uncle to go there, so he can let a bunch of teenage strangers throw a massive party at his house
Planting an explosive device in his uncle’s architectural model of the city, which blows up in front of a large crowd and causes him to get fired from his lifelong dream job
Plotting to break up his uncle’s long-term relationship with his girlfriend because Clifford has a weird sexual attraction to her

And just think, all of this could’ve been avoided if someone just took Clifford to Dinosaur World. His uncle even has a lifetime free pass so there’s really no excuse.

Before you get angry at Martin Short, this is a joke about face lifts, not Asian people.

What Martin Short does in this movie as the title character is absolutely staggering. The gimmick of seeing the 40 year old comic actor gallivanting as a 10 year old somehow works, purely based on his performance alone. The filmmakers don’t use prosthetics or make him walk on his knees, instead opting for simple in-camera tricks like putting his costars on boxes and using slightly larger props to make him seem smaller. Short just fully commits with nonstop physical comedy and a barrage of silly faces and immature non-sequiturs. Director Paul Flaherty worked with Short on SCTV and knows how to play to his strengths, with Clifford coming across like a mix of many of Short’s famous characters from that show and Saturday Night Live. Flaherty also understands that Martin Short doing all of this horrible stuff is funny. An actual child trying to crash a commercial airliner for personal entertainment …not so much. (Sorry, PROBLEM CHILD.) Plus, adults playing children is inherently weird, which is kind of the point of the movie. Clifford is supposed to be off-putting and supremely creepy.

Charles Grodin, meanwhile, is also at his exasperated best in CLIFFORD, playing the somewhat straight man who slowly but surely has a mental breakdown. He and Short have an undeniable chemistry and comic banter and watching them go back and forth is extremely entertaining. There are some exchanges where Grodin underhandedly mocks and shuts down Clifford that is just a joy to behold. (There is one specific “Shut up” that is a true masterclass of comedic delivery.) it’s the kind of character Grodin really excelled at playing and watching Martin’s mental faculties slowly deteriorate over the course of 90 minutes until he’s even more deranged than his nephew is so satisfying, even though you feel horrible for the guy. And when he finally snaps and takes Clifford to Dinosaur World to ride the rides until he literally dies, you are there with him fully supportive of child murder.

Charles Grodin getting the call about the BEETHOVEN sequel.

CLIFFORD didn’t have an easy path to the big screen, mostly thanks to Orion Pictures’ bankruptcy and some ensuing reshoots. The aforementioned bookends, which see Clifford as an elderly priest in the year 2050, were added years later after the film sat on a shelf and I suspect forced them to retool the ending in ways that are truly bizarre. As it is, it seems like a good chunk of the final act happens off screen. It answers no questions and waves over all the hard stuff—Ignoring the fallout of Martin and Sarah’s breakup, Martin publicly losing his job, the consequences of all the bomb threats, kidnapping, child abuse, willfully causing millions of dollars in damages to an amusement park—all in favor of a sappy feel-good ending that just doesn’t fit with the rest of the film.

Still, I think CLIFFORD is worth watching as a cinematic oddity and as a great showcase for its two stars. It’s not for everyone, but if you wrote it off back in the day, I think it’s time to give it another shot. (Sorry, Mom.)

Charles Grodin realizing his agent actually signed him up for the BEETHOVEN sequel.