Set in Los Angeles, Detective Casey Gallagher (Anthony Michael Hall) is seen as a joke by most of the force due to his unconventional and lackadaisical attitude and is given the opportunity by Captain Stan Walton (Jerry Orbach) to run point on a sting involving diamond smuggler Zadar (Eli Danker). With Detective Samatha Kennedy (Claudia Christian) and Detective Kaminsky working backup, the sting seems poised for success until an unknown assailant arrives knocking Gallagher unconcious. Having lost the diamonds and the cash Gallagher is blamed for the failure and is taken off the case and after finding a satchel with a stone returns home. Gallager soon discovers a strange little creature named Gnorm (Rob Paulson) has followed him home and wants the stone back, but Gallagher will only give it back if Gnorm can identify the assailant he witnessed in the park.
A Gnome Named Gnorm (aka Upworld) is a 1989 action comedy (though released in 1994) directed by Stan Winston and written by producers and occasional screenwriters John Watson and Pen Densham who are best known for writing Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The film came about from Watson wanting to do a mash-up in the style of. As he described it "E. T. meets 48 Hrs." which laid the groundwork for the initial idea. Initially intended to be a theatrical release, the film found itself in limbo after the original distributor Vestron Pictures went bankrupt and the film sat on a shelf for four years until being released direct to video. A Gnome Named Gnorm is a strange little experiment in its mixture of 80s stalwarts like buddy-cops and magical creatures, but not one that's altogether successful.
Being directed by someone who specializes in special effects, I will say that Winston and his team are to be commended for the work done in bringing the titular Gnorm to life. Created using a mixture of animatronics and puppetry, the creation of Gnorm from a technical perspective is well done and avoids some of the issues that have plagued similar productions (such as Howard the Duck for example). Outside of that however, A Gnome Named Gnorm isn't all that interesting as it goes through a very mediocre retread of standard buddy cop cliches without any real meat or substance to the mystery or the characters. While the film tries to do a parallel of Gnorm and Gallagher being "outsider oddballs" who are disregarded by their peers, there's very little time spent developing them beyond broad archetypes delivering one liners and clumsy slapstick. Gnorm himself is essentially a mix of an Ewok by way of Johnny 5 (Paulson's voice even sounds similar) and aside from being horny and using a spouting a lot of euphemisms for women's posteriors and breasts there's not a whole lot there character wise. Anthony Michael Hall once again shows why he struggled to become a leading man following his failed efforts with Out of Bounds and Johnny Be Good and while the character as written is mostly an inept doofus who has no real busniness doing what he does, Hall comes across as very stiff without any strong showcase of comic timing or leading man charisma.
A Gnome Named Gnorm is the kind of movie where you can definitely feel it was the product of the producers because it feels like the creative thought started and ended with the pitch of "E. T. meets 48 Hrs." before handing it off to the production team to make a purse out of a Sow's ear. It's really just the last dying gasp of two worn into the ground 80s genre formats haphazardly tied together in a vain attempt at squeezing blood from a long drained stone.
