Hello, Gooby

According to the synopsis on IMDb, Canadian-made Gooby is about an eleven-year-old boy named Willy who is "terrified" to move into a new home with his family. Terrified! "He's convinced it's filled with evil space aliens out to get him." We could go into depth about how wrong that part alone is, but let's move on. Naturally the only thing that could help Willy get over his terror is his stuffed bear, which horrifyingly comes to life and takes him on a series of wacky adventures.

The infamous "stash-the-body-in-a-leaf-pile" scene.

Now, we certainly would never judge a film based on the trailer alone, which is why we contacted the Toronto-based production company, Coneybeare Stories, to request a screener. They never responded, which means the trailer is all we have to go on.

So, back to the trailer: what sucks about it? Oh, man, where to begin? The jarring changes in music; the way it shows characters speaking with no sound; the jokes that aren't really jokes; the use of the same grocery store scene, like, twenty times. And then there's the unforgivable use of the Comic Sans font.

And before you devil's advocate types get all uppity, we get that this is a kids' movie, all right? But we're pretty sure any kid out of kindergarten will hate it. How can we tell? How about the fact that Gooby looks terrifying? How about that Willy doesn't even look like he's having fun at any point?

Yeah, the kid pretty much has this look of fear on his face the entire time.

The horror remix that has already popped up on YouTube seems more convincing than the actual trailer. Even if Gooby was intended as a parody of pretty much every kid-forms-friendship-with-weird-creature family film ever made (it even rips off the bike scene from E.T. ), the parody's not obvious enough for people to know it's supposed to be a parody. And, no, this trailer isn't a joke either—we checked: the movie's been reviewed in the Star and is currently playing at the AMC in Woodbridge.

Oh, and it co-stars Eugene Levy as a character named Mr. Nerdlinger. Mr. Nerdlinger. What, Eugene, you couldn't get cast in Cheaper by the Dozen 3 or something?

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