by Nelson
A foggy memory of a corny killer kid slasher I saw on television as teenager forced me to call upon the powers of Roku’s search feature and face a startling revelation: There are an awful lot of movies called The Paperboy. But only one centers on a murderous twelve-year-old who just wants a new family. 1994’s The Paperboy is a hidden gem in an era of rapid-fire horror and thriller flicks that looked and felt an awful lot like made-for-TV movies but inexplicably managed to get theatrical releases. I miss those days. We got everything from movies about unstoppable killer dogs, emotionally damaged ice cream men, and, in the case of the Jamie Lee Curtis flick Mother’s Boys, a completely unhinged mother willing to go to frightening lengths to reclaim the two kids she abandoned years prior.
Johnny McFarley is the neighborhood’s portrait of boyhood innocence – a fun-loving, thoughtful 12-year-old who cares so much about the folks on his newspaper route that he’s willing to go above and beyond his paper tossing duties. He’s all about performing good deeds like picking up groceries for his elderly neighbor, Mrs. Thorpe. He seems to be a truly cherubic young man right up until he slips a plastic bag over the old lady’s head and suffocates her to death.
Don’t judge Johnny too harshly though. He’s not a proponent of random, senseless violence. In fact, he’s incredibly concerned with being a “good boy” because “Jesus doesn’t take bad boys.” He figures the best way to ensure that he doesn’t slip into bad boy territory is by finding the perfect mother since his actual mother died the previous year. His father is some sort of golf supplies salesman who is never, ever home, so Johnny is ready to start over with a brand new family. Sure, he kills the neighbor, but it’s just part of his quest for a stable home life and the furthest thing on Earth from a senseless murder of an overly trusting senior citizen. After hearing so much about her daughter, Melissa, and her young granddaughter, Cammie, Johnny realizes that he’s found the New Mom and Lil’ Sis he’s been waiting for. And, if one thing is sure to bring the brood home from the big city, it’s their mother’s unexpected death by asphyxiation.
Melissa and Cammie barely get a chance to walk in the house before Johnny pops up to introduce himself and talk about how awesome his friendship with Mrs. Thorpe was and how devastated he is by the loss. He even hitches a ride to the funeral with the grieving pair. The mother and daughter have no idea that the boy next door is a calculating fiend who has hidden a baby monitor in the house to listen in on his new family – who, for some reason, have decided to move next door for the summer. Thanks to his sneaky advantage, things initially go according to plan, but then Brian Nolastnamegiven hits the scene to romance the girl he longed for in high school. Just like that, Melissa’s out on a date and what was initially planned as a cookout with everyone turns into a babysitting gig for the devastated Paperboy. He pitches a fit and throws a plate of hotdogs down before stomping home. I can’t decide which part of the scene is funnier – Johnny’s voice becoming a high pitched screech whenever he’s upset or his preference for putting a hotdog in the bun before grilling it.
Things don’t really get much better for the neighborhood newsboy. On top of Melissa’s newfound connection with Brian, he’s also got to deal with the local Party Girl who bad mouths him, sprays him with a water hose for a hilariously extended period of time, and makes a regular habit of breaking curfew. I’m not sure why these unsavory characters keep showing up in these types of movies. It never ends well. Party Girl winds up getting paralyzed after an “accidental” fall from a ladder, but that only puts a Band-Aid on Johnny’s quickly unraveling familial fantasy. He’s also got to cope with Mrs. Rosemont – an old friend of his mother’s who hates him with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. She insists that he’s afflicted with “the mark of Cain” on top of being a no-good hoodlum.
In addition to being the Crazy Ralph of the movie, Mrs. Rosemont provides the closest thing we get to an explanation of why the demented delivery boy is so unhinged and obsessed with finding a mom. His real mother was a big subscriber to the “spare the rod” philosophy and spent so much time disciplining her son that she couldn’t even lift her arm the next day. As unsettling an idea as this may be, I can’t help but remember The Simpsons episode about Ned Flanders and the pent up anger his father’s year-long spanking left him with. Sadly, Johnny is no Ned Flanders. He breaks into Mrs. Rosemont’s house and gives her a heart attack by pretending to kill her dog. You’ve got to admire how the kid goes about his killing by setting every murder up to look like an accident. Sure, Mrs. Rosemont essentially dies of a fright, and that probably wasn’t too much fun for her, but at least he didn’t kill the dog. That’d just be evil.
The Paperboy is a lot like The Stepfather – only with a stepson instead of a stepdad in search of household bliss. The second Johnny sets his sights on his would-be mom and sister, he’s ready to move on from his current situation. He bashes his dad’s head in with a putter and digs a grave for him in the basement. He has every intention of becoming a Thorpe – despite no real indication that they want him around at all. Johnny McFarley is no Jerry Blake/Bill Hodgkins/Gene Clifford. He really only manages to endear himself to Cammie. Melissa never quite gets over the hotdog incident. The more he hangs around, the more Melissa thinks that he’s not just a lonely kid; he’s a neglected kid! In an ironic twist, she’s making plans to contact social services and have him taken to a new family the entire time he’s trying to kill his way into her family!
Everything comes to a head when Johnny decides to get Brian out of the way by burning him alive. Melissa discovers the baby monitor and finally realizes that the awkward boy that she’s been letting hang out with her six-year-old on a daily basis despite their radical age difference is actually a homicidal maniac. Johnny grabs a pickaxe and goes on the attack after Melissa tells him the family hates him. The cops show up just when Johnny’s would-be mom manages to snatch away the axe, and Johnny immediately goes into victim mode and screams that he’s being attacked by a crazy woman who “thinks she’s my mother!” Just when it seems like he’s about to get off scot free *and* have Melissa locked up for rejecting him, Brian arrives on the scene. He survived the fire, and he’s ready to point his interfering finger at Johnny. The movie ends with the killer kid being hauled off by the cops screeching that he’s a “good boy.”
It’s no Stepfather, and it’s certainly no Stepfather 2, but I loved watching The Paperboy. It’s insanely fun to watch Johnny’s good boy mask slip off and hear his voice shoot up three octaves while he screams in frustration. There’s even a part where he appears to have a screeching seizure on his bed after hearing Brian and Melissa hook up over the monitor. You can tell the actor is having a blast making the movie, and, as the credits fade out, his psychotic wailing goes from desperately disturbing to hilarious: “Somebody call my lawyer!” and “I’ve got rights!” Marc Malnut didn’t exactly have a decades-spanning career in acting, but he can indisputably hang his hat on his masterful performance as a bad boy who is determined to be good no matter how many people he has to kill to do it.
Doubtfire 