PG-13 | 1h 53m | Comedy, Adventure, Fantasy | March 22, 2024
Did you have idyllic, 1970s’ childhood summer vacations, with green-leafy days, mucky-pond swimming, and bike-riding with buddies? The lake, the beach, warm, glow-y sunsets, and fireflies? The day-soundtrack of which was the lawnmower and the ice cream truck, and katydids by night?
Now, this pie is the fee that they must pay unto her, to obtain the TV password in order to play a brand new video game. Which new video game? The one they’ve just snatched after a successful military-spy-recon-commandeering mission, facilitated by mini-bikes and paintball guns, from the local warehouse, where they pull a fast one on the security guard, and abscond with the new Xbox or whatever it is.
The Kid Crew
The kids are: older brother Hazel (Charlie Stover), kid brother Jodie (Skyler Peters), and girl-bestie Alice (Phoebe Ferro). If these were Peanuts characters, Alice would be in-charge Lucy, ginger-haired Hazel would be Charlie Brown at his most optimistically and enthusiastically baseball-crazed (actually, being the dirt-baggiest of the bunch, Hazel also has more than a little in common with Pigpen). And little Jodie steals the entire show as a latter-day Linus.
In fact, I need to describe Jodie more right now: He’s one of those brilliant, savant-ish kids who doesn’t actually have a speech impediment, but by some strange quirk of personality, affects a strange accent, like, from another planet, and is so unintelligible he needs his own subtitles. And when you see the translation, you discover he’s saying brilliant and absolutely hilarious things.
For example: The kids head out to the bakery to get the aforementioned blueberry pie, but learn the pie-maker is sick. They go visit her. She answers the door and tells them she’ll not be baking any pies today because she’s got a high fever. If they want her pie recipe, they need to go get her something that’s “colder than ice,” to cool her down first. She adds, “Haunt me no longer, sprites of the forest!”
The kiddies ponder on what could be colder than ice. They attack the padlocked dry-ice bin at the local 7-Eleven. Alice filches some peppermint gum, with the kid-logic that if you breathe in hard, after chewing it, it’s colder-than-cold. And then we hear some gibberish from Jodie, who’s gesturing at a yard sale across the street. The subtitle reveals: “What about the rather chilling, ghastly doll on the other side of the road over there? It’ll give her a chill down the spine.”
Other Stuff That Happens!
The team is kidnapped by poachers! They outwit a big, bearded, 9 mm Glock-packing huntsman named John Redrye (Charles Halford)! They befriend a golden-haired fairy (their age) named Petal Hollyhock (Lorelei Olivia Mote)! They battle with the wily witch Anna-Freya (Lio Tipton) who’s got unexplained mystical powers (who happens to be Petal’s mom, and who’s also a taxidermist by trade, poaching to get her raw materials). The kids bond together to become best friends forever!
“Riddle of Fire” is mostly set in the real, contemporary world, but director Weston Razooli uses the occasional dash of magical realism to submerge the film in a fairytale-ish realm, making it almost a perfect bedtime movie, as opposed to just another coming-of-age kid flick.
All in All
Using screen fonts that derive from “The Hobbit” and other high-fantasy tales, as well as having utilized analog technology and shot the movie with 16 mm to resemble the dreamy, hazy atmosphere of 1970s-era children’s adventure fantasy, Mr. Razooli succeeds in capturing that particular throwback nostalgia.One reason I can’t highly recommend it as a bedtime movie, is that the kids occasionally curse like miniature sailors. Now, granted, the occasional f-bomb is used to excellent comedic affect, and it’s all pretty realistic in terms of how little kids talk today, but this publication is attempting to help nudge our dying, disastrously disintegrating, daily decaying, demon-infested culture back towards tradition.
Speaking of the world’s currently eroding traditions, “Riddle of Fire” has a fairly strong feminist undertone: the witch’s big, scary, doltish boyfriend is thoroughly emasculated by her, especially when she at one point fires a bullet a few inches past his head when he balks at carrying out an order. She controls him and her three kids with spoken spells (read, hypnotism). She’s played by Ana Leigh Tipton who’s lately become a they/them and turned into Lio Tipton. And in the kid crew, it’s the girls who make all the decisions.
But, possibly, these minor drawbacks are only noticeable to an adult. Kids won’t notice. But if you use it as a bedtime movie, don’t be surprised if you suddenly catch your 3-year old trying on an f-bomb for size.
