Cocoon
RON Howard's Cocoon is a film of many parts. Superficially a light-hearted tale of old folks challenging mortality in the sun-kissed surroundings of Florida, it's got elements of classic science fiction, cheap and cheerful geriatric humour and even manages to make a few points about how we treat the elderly along the way.
Released in 1985, and fresh out this month on Blu-ray via Eureka Entertainment, it's an odd mix of styles that all too often tips everything over into gloopy sentimentality – but somewhere, deep below the saccharine surface, lies a film that Steven Spielberg himself would be proud of.
This is sci-fi with a heart, basically, and there's nothing wrong with that.
The brace of Oscars it bagged suggests it worked with the power brokers of Hollywood at any rate.
Don Amache, Wilford Brimley and Hume Cronyn are Art, Ben and Joe, three retirement home old timers who get their illicit thrills breaking into the beautiful pool of a nearby abandoned resort.
The guys still feel like rampant teenagers but their bodies are starting to let them down, leaving them with health problems, poor eyesight and an ever decreasing capacity for chasing the girls the way they used to in their youth.
Into this picture comes a young boat owner (Steve Guttenberg doing his usual awkward everyman thing) who is hired to look after an odd group of new arrivals in the area led by Walter (Brian Dennehy) and Kitty (Tahnee Welch) who turn out to be aliens on a mission to save some of their fellow visitors from space who were preserved in cocoons at the bottom of the ocean when Atlantis sank some 10,000 years ago.
When Walter hires the old abandoned resort to store the ancient cocoons, Art, Ben and Joe find that a quick swim in the pool suddenly refreshes parts they thought were long gone and withered away.
Before too long they're dramatically jumping off the diving board, break-dancing like fiends in the local nightclub and generally telling all their friends to get themselves down the resort and lose a few decades.
If the first half plays out like a bog standard teen movie as performed by sassy senior citizens, things get a little more serious when the aliens – known as Antareans – make an offer of immortality to the elderly interlopers.
Can they give up their sometimes difficult families in order to live forever? Are they messing with nature by toying with the time on earth they've been granted by the big man upstairs?
These are big issues and Howard handles the dilemma facing our ageing heroes well and never shies away from the very real shadow of death that's always hanging over proceedings.
The trio of Ameche, Brimley and Cronyn tackle the subject matter with passion and deliver the gags with style, with Ameche even bagging one of those aforementioned Oscars for Best Supporting Actor: acting-wise, his performance as Art, a crooning lover man who finally gets to wed his lifelong sweetheart, is probably the pick of the bunch here.
Tahnee Welch (daughter of Raquel) is suitably otherworldly as the good-looking alien visitor and even Guttenberg, ubiquitous in the mid-'80s, doesn't spoil proceedings too much.
With commentary from director Howard and a wealth of featurettes and extras this is the definitive version of a much loved 80's slice of soft hearted sci-fi.
