Problem Child

Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski found the idea in a 1988 Los Angeles Times story, "An Adopted Boy--and Terror Begins," about an Orange County couple suing the county after adopting a violently disturbed boy nobody had told them had been returned to the agency before. They saw a dark, adult satire of the late-eighties wave of films in which cute kids taught cynical adults to love: Three Men and a Baby, Baby Boom, Look Who's Talking, Uncle Buck. Universal wanted a children's film, and Dennis Dugan, a TV director making his feature debut, shot it in and around Dallas in the fall of 1989 with John Ritter, whom he had pushed on a studio that wanted a bigger name, Jack Warden as Big Ben, Gilbert Gottfried as adoption agent Igor Peabody, and Michael Richards as the Bow Tie Killer. Macaulay Culkin reportedly auditioned for Junior; Michael Oliver got it.

The first test screening was a catastrophe: 70 percent of the audience walked out and the film scored 30. Universal ordered two weeks of reshoots in March 1990, including a new ending and Lucy's birthday party, the scene where Junior wrecks a magic act. Alexander cried at the cast and crew screening. Then it opened on July 27, 1990, third behind Presumed Innocent and Ghost, and kept going: $53.5 million in the US and $72.3 million worldwide on a budget reported at $10 to $11 million. Reviews were savage, it sits at 3 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and it had not been screened for critics at all, but audiences graded it A-minus. A poster showing the family cat in a tumble dryer drew protests from In Defense of Animals and came down at some theaters; the sequel's poster put Ritter in the dryer instead.

Problem Child 2 followed in 1991 with the original cast, a made-for-TV third film aired on NBC in 1995 with Ritter and Oliver replaced, and USA Network ran an animated series from 1993 to 1994. TV airings trimmed the remarks about adoption that critics had found insensitive. Ritter and Amy Yasbeck, who played Flo, fell in love on the set and married in 1999. And in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear, the movie Robert De Niro's Max Cady cackles at in a theater to unnerve Nick Nolte's family is this one. The writers still call it "a mess," and also one of the "very few [PG-rated] children's films that black and that crazy." Both are true.