ROGER CORMAN and CHEESE, part V: "Little Miss Millions" and Screamin' Sicilian Bessie's Revenge Cheese Pizza

"A Roger Corman Family Film?" I hear you ask. It was rare but there were certainly a handful - mostly in the 80s and mostly Science Fiction stuff. Some even found their way onto the Walt Disney Video label. But a Roger Corman Christmas Movie? Seeing is believing! 

1993's Little Miss Millions (sometimes called Home For Christmas) is directed by longtime Roger Corman employee Jim Wynorski, who also cowrote the film specifically as a vehicle for Jennifer Love Hewitt shortly after directing her in 1992's Corman kid pic Munchie. 14-year-old Jennifer (credited only as "Love Hewitt") plays 9-year-old Heather who's run away from her bitchy foster mom's L.A. mansion in search of her birth mother. The foster mom hires a bounty hunter by the name of Nick Frost (Howard Hesseman) to bring Heather back. Nick finds her pretty immediately and the authorities mistake it as a kidnapping; the FBI chases them for the duration of the picture as the two leads bicker and sass their way to L.A. via busses and hitchhiking and stolen cars. The snot kid/grumpy grownup dynamic is derivative of a thousand other things, but ounce-for-ounce (and sometimes scene-for-scene) this is an impressively decent redo of Midnight Run, with James Avery in the Yaphet Kotto role, Steve Landesberg in the Joey Pants role, and a music score by Joel Goldsmith for which Danny Elfman could've easily sued. The mismatched buddy setup is almost always exciting to us, and having two good actors like they have here can usually make it feel kinda fresh (even if it's a total ripoff). 

There's a kinda cult around this pizza brand; the folks who like it really like it. We got some crazy excessive cheese kind with the big frozen equidistant blobs of mozzarella that are supposed to melt into each other when you cook it. And for the most part they did, and the cheese was excellent and definitely the best part - almost enough to distract from the curiously tangy sauce that dominated every bite. And of course no frozen pizza has mastered the crust yet so we don't deduct points there (usually). You certainly can't say it was bland -- this one felt so close and yet so far. 

The Movie: A-

The Pizza: B-