Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller (review)

This is one of the strangest children’s movies I’ve ever seen: it’s halfway over and without a hint of fantasy to it when it suddenly turns all, well, fantastical. Tommy Tricker (Anthony Rogers) is a pubescent con man who steals a rare and valuable postage stamp from the collection of the father of one of his classmates, Ralph James (Lucas Evans), and when Ralph sets out to recover his now-furious father’s property, he accidentally discovers a magical method of shrinking himself down to ant size so he can hide in a postage stamp and get mailed around the world. Weird. It’s probably one of those things that you had to be a kid for the first time you saw it, which could explain the bit of a cult following the film seems to have... or at least the breathless anticipation some Generation Xers seem to be in over the film’s first DVD release. (The flick dates from 1988, with its Canadian origin contributing to its obscurity. The video transfer look good, though, and the audio is fine, which is a very good thing: a 14-year-old Rufus Wainwright appears in the movie and on the soundtrack as a teen singer. And that accidental bit of pop-culture ephemera is the disc’s only “extra.”) Today’s kids should get a kick out of it, too.

[buy at Amazon]

(Technorati tags: Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller, Rufus Wainwright)