Saw it once, it was pretty bad! (Rant about bullying in films)
There are cult classics like Drop Dead Fred, Encino Man, and Problem Child 1&2 and then there's films like this one, that don't deserve to be cult classics! Honestly if anyone likes this film, they don't know what the definition of "cult classic" means. This film fits very well alongside gems, such as The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, Theodore Rex, and Good Boy! Watched this years ago and it was terrible. There was this stupid piece of shit bully who picked on the Grover character for no reason (because bullies are heartless bastards, that's why) and did not even get his comeuppance or at the very least, redeem himself and that's just horrible writing!
Why they had to shoehorn a generic bully just makes the movie even worse than it already is. For some reason, a lot of 90s family films had this bad habit of putting in generic stereotypical bullies in films. Sure, the 80s did this as well, but at least the bullies were actual fleshed out villains and not just written for shits and giggles (Biff Tannen from Back To The Future, Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story, etc.) but in the 90s, not a single fuck was given. Also, this shit continued well into the 2000s before finally dying around the early-mid 2010s. If there's one thing that political correctness is good for; it's banning badly written stereotypical bullies from films. Sadly, that still happens to this day, just not as much as it used to, like it was back in the 90s and 2000s. It's actually quite rare and only some films from the past couple of years like Shazaam and The Adam Project have resorted to this travesty bullshit! I guess Hollywood will never learn!
There are actually some films where bullying is actually handled well, like in Carrie (and its two remakes) The Karate Kid/Cobra Kai series, and most Stephen King adapted films like IT the aforementioned Carrie. It all comes to down to how you handle writing the bullies. if you're gonna write a bully into a film; one or two things must happen, have them get what's coming to them or have them reform and become an ally to the person they tormented, now that's actual good writing. If you're just gonna shoehorn in a generic stereotypical 1-dimensional bully and not do either of them things and write them as a "Karma Houdini" after they given the main character a pounding, then you shouldn't even fucking bother in the first place or else you don't deserve to be a writer at all.