TheRetroCritic

I review the 1992 dark comedy Stay Tuned .

Released in 1992, Stay Tuned  was a dark comedy about a couple who gets sucked into a demonic satellite dish before being forced to survive living inside various TV shows from Hell as their kids try to help them back on the other side. John Ritter is Roy Knable, a couch potato loser husband who is too addicted to television to notice his marriage is falling apart and Pam Dawber plays his much more successful wife Helen. One day, Roy meets the mysterious Mr. Spike (Jeffrey Jones) who offers him a free trial for a new TV with a brand new satellite dish. Roy accepts and, soon enough, he and Helen find themselves stuck in all kinds of twisted shows from westerns to gameshows, even cartoons. The concept for Stay Tuned is very silly but also very clever as it provides a lot of opportunities for social satire and creative scenarios, not to mention hilarious puns (Fresh Prince Of Darkness, Wayne's Underworld etc.). It's easy to see why Tim Burton was once attached to this project

In-between directing more arty/trendy flicks, Terry Zwigoff tried his hand at a somewhat more commercial effort with Bad Santa , a Christmas movie with a difference. The main difference being that our "bad Santa" is a shady, foul-mouthed, boozing thief who pisses his pants. Billy Bob Thornton and Tony Cox's Christmas tradition in this movie is posing as a mall Santa and Elf then robbing the whole place after the busiest shopping day of the year. Unfortunately, Willie (Thornton) is struggling to keep both his alcoholism and his sex addiction under control so he soon becomes a liability in grave danger of messing up the whole plan. Along the way, Willie meets Sue (Lauren Graham), a girl with a Santa fetish and they begin a relationship of sorts. He also meets a clingy overweight young boy amusingly called Thurman Merman, played by an appropriately wide-eyed Brett Kelly, who, for whatever reason, believes Willie to be the real Santa Claus. And although the kid annoys