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George (John Lithgow), the family man at the center of William Dear’s good-natured Harry and the Hendersons (1987), starts the film zooming home from a camping trip with his wife and kids in their tan station wagon, oblivious to the animals milling around the road’s margins — cougars, black bears, deers — until he isn’t. A spot of bad sun glare puts the creature most Northwesterners would feel the worst about hitting right in his path: Bigfoot. “I feel so guilty — what if it’s the only one?” George’s wife, Nancy (Melinda Dillon), wonders tearily. “What if we’ve just rendered an entire species extinct?”

George and his family are moved to sling the breathtakingly tall body atop the car and take it home, uncertain what they’ll do but positive they can’t leave him prone on the side of the road. They won’t get to finish sleeping on a final decision: they’re awoken by the creature, whom they’ll soon call Harry, going to town on the foods lining their now-overturned refrigerator in the dead of night. The animal at first seems hostile while casually wrecking various sections of molding, sets of stairs, and potted houseplants in the span of a few minutes. But with his puppy-dog eyes and capacity for belly laughs (he particularly loves the canned jokes told in ‘50s-sitcom reruns that play on the living-room TV), Harry turns out to be not much of a threat. He’s a cross between a Golden Retriever and a gorilla in a good mood, so lovable that he could ruin your favorite belonging and you might feel guilty about feeling even a twinge of anger.

Like E.T. (1982) if its eponymous beast were fluffy and if there was no real emotional heft, Harry and the Hendersons chugs along likably, not dissimilarly from a handful of sitcom episodes stitched together to make a feature. (The film not surprisingly spawned a two-season-long TV spinoff in 1991.) There isn’t much conflict. Harry will escape and briefly become a legend around the Seattle neighborhoods where much of the film was shot rather than the endlessness of the Northwest forests. There’s a camouflage-donning French-Canadian hunter with a beret and an obsession with making Sasquatch his latest prey always lurking around, threatening to take out our new tall friend with a bullet. 

A product of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, Harry and the Hendersons is the kind of conspicuously family-oriented entertainment that forgivably eschews real stakes. For the kids, it will probably be a snacky morsel of fan fiction about what it might be like to have Bigfoot as a family member who’ll ferry you around on his back like a woolly uncle. For adults, it will likely at best be pleasant and at worst cloyingly cutesy. I tended to be in the former camp, generally won over by the cuddly creature design and the convincing work of the more-than-7-foot-tall actor, Kevin Peter Hall, who fills out the suit. A nearly two-hour running time for a film with this thin a premise may sometimes feel like a test, but you could be in worse company.