Cheap The Pagemaster (DVD) (Macaulay Culkin, Christopher Lloyd) (Maurice Hunt, Joe Johnston) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Pagemaster

One of Macaulay Culkin's last movies
The Pagemaster is a rare movie, that has both live action and animation. It's about a boy that hates heights (and who couldn't blame him). And is also a rare live action movie that has a G rating. The live action part of the movie was directed by Joe Johnston. And the animation part of the movie was directed by Maurice Hunt. As the movie opens, Ricard Tyler (Macaulay Culkin) is sent to get some nails for the tree house his father is bulding in a tree, Richard refuses to climb. But it starts to rain. So Richard takes shelter in a library, where a man (Christopher Lloyd) who claims that he has a talent for what people need. He ends up with a library card, and asks the man where the phone is. Christopher Lloyd also voices the title character. And when paint starts to fall from a picture of the Pagemaster, Richard tries to find the exit, but can't, and is turned into a cartoon character, and is visited by the Pagemaster, who tells him that he has to get to the exit to get back to a human character, which he is still in the library.

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Most uninteresting
Perhaps young children watch with happiness, but this animated feature is pure blandness. Storyline: a psychotic child who has no hobbies and is obscessed with statistics of every sort of accident (he rides a bicycle with blinkers, a protective shield, and a loud beeper). He always wears several helmets and is afraid of heights. He is so completely pathetic that no one can possibly sympathize with him. Next, he gets into a giant mystic library in the middle of the storm, totally dark and forgotten, where a mystic librarian (Frank Lloyd) hands him a library card, a ticket to adventure. Soon the paint collapses and he is swept into the cartoon version of the library and the books in it, assisted by three book pals - Fantasy (Whoopi Goldberg), a pirate Adventure (I'm quite sure his voice is provided by Patrick Stewart), and Horror (I can't quite tell who that is). Their entire adventure to the exit sign is so lifeless and dull, perhaps due to the poorly-done script and some pathetic book interpretations, that even the spooky glowing-green smoke in the visuals does not save it.

I found the Pagemaster to be a spectacular drag. Don't watch it, please.

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A terrible waste of talent...
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...in terms of the actors and energy devoted to a potentially exciting idea, spoiled by lack of true imagination on the part of the writers, producers, and directors of this movie. When anticipating theatrical release, the kids in the family were excited by the trailers, but they were excruciatingly bored by the film itself, which proved to be unimaginative, uninspired, and without the sort of spark to be expected of the collection of voice and acting talents participating therein.

And I could determine in '94 why the movie was bound to suck. Note that the three genres of fiction instantiated in *The Pagemaster* were:

(1) Fantasy

(2) Adventure

(3) Horror

Not a whiff of Science Fiction, kiddies. Of course. Proverbs 29:18 all over the place ("Without a vision, the people perish"). The mark of the mundanes is all over this movie. Ostensible credits notwithstanding, if there was a genuine science fiction fan involved in the production of *The Pagemaster*, he was kept drugged and trussed up in a trunk somewhere on the set so he couldn't interfere with the process of turning perfectly good ingredients like these into a flat, uninteresting, drooling dollop of witlessness.

Beware the mark of the mundanes, my people! In this as in everything else in life, they are walking Black Holes of vapidness, guaranteeing in every spoiled celluloid square of *The Pagemaster* an overwhelming dose of major suckage.
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