Brittany Garcia - Drop Dead Fred 1991

Brittany Garcia 

Title: Drop Dead Fred

Director: Ate de Jong 

Year: 1991 

Drop Dead Fred was an awesome movie. The movie is about a woman who leaves her husband and eventually ends up back living with her mom. When this happens, her childhood imaginary friend comes back to be an active part of her life. To start, this movie went hand in hand with one of the subjects I was studying for my child psychology exam. It is a one of Piaget’s theory about pretend play. It is the time in a child’s life where they have the cognitive ability to come up with imaginary people and so forth. This movie was a perfect example of this theory and I found it very helpful for my psych class.  

Throughout the movie, flashback is utilized multiple times. The story goes back and forth from when Elizabeth, one of the main characters, is a child and to current when she is a grown adult. The flashbacks are put to use very successfully. For example, it takes a part of Elizabeth’s life currently and flashes back to a significantly similar situation from when she was a child. I feel that the transitions from past to present were smooth. 

One other aspect I loved about this movie is that it was very humorous. I typically have a hard time sitting down and watching movies because I have a busy schedule and movies can be pretty time consuming. If I ever have time to sit, I usually fall asleep. This one though, I watched late one night, around 1 a.m. and it was so funny, it actually kept my attention and kept me awake the entire movie. The imaginary friend, Fred is hilarious. They use multiple different special effects to portray his character, For example, in one scene Elizabeth sneezes in which case it sends Fred in a ball across the entire room and he bounces to hit every wall before coming stable again. In another scene, because Elizabeth is the only person that can see him, without knowing it, her mom ends up closing his head in the refrigerator. When he comes out his head it flat as a pancake. To me, scenes like this were just too funny. 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and all it’s different effects.