• Directed by Alexander Cassini
• Written by Michael Davis and Jamie McLaughlin
• Starring
  • Matt Koruba
  • Stacie Randall
  • Biff Manard
  • George Miserlis
  • Tom Fahn
• Produced by Vlad Paunescu and Peter Yuval
• Executive produced by Peter Locke and Donald Kushner (and Charles Band, uncredited)

As yet another of the Full Moon/Kushner Locke kidvid co-productions of the late ’90s, this movie demonstrates that the entertainment value of a movie isn’t strictly determined by its production resources. Compare this movie with Little Ghost (1997), for instance — a film with which it shares both production companies, its era of production, shooting location, target audience, and (presumably) production resources in terms of budget and schedule. Little Ghost comes across as adequate and inoffensive, if supremely forgettable. On the other hand, The Incredible Genie takes most of the same elements and comes up with something distinctly more engaging and entertaining, though more uneven. Though it’s nothing like immortal cinema, I’d much rather watch the latter than the former. Just remember, we’re grading on a curve.

Thanks to the magic of stock footage, American seeker Dopler (George Miserlis) and his Arabian guide Ali (Eugen Cristea) start the movie out by finding a lost tomb in Egypt. Dopler’s on a quest for supernatural artifacts and powers, and the latter is surely in evidence when a stone door sealing a burial chamber collapses on him and leaves him none the worse for wear. (Unless the ancient Egyptians used styrofoam in some of their latter construction projects.) Thanks to some souped-up goggles designed to detect magical auras, he soon find the artifact he wants in the tomb: An old lamp. (And a vengeful mummy. Because an Egyptian tomb without a mummy is like a Twinkie without the cream filling. But the mummy is easily dealt with by “spinning” it out of its wrappings, leaving a bashful skeleton.)

“‘Take the treasure, but don’t touch my remote.’ What?”

Dopler takes the lamp back to his boss, Dr. Farrow (Biff Manard of the first two Trancers films), in “America” (cough, cough), at the NSA’s Division of Paranormal Research, but Farrow’s too busy testing every other psychic and pseudoscientific crackpot alive in his labs, and frustrated with Dopler’s lack of concrete results with any military applications, he fires him. (But Dopler does get to keep the lamp as his last travel souvenir.

Meanwhile, adolescent Simon Alexander (Matt Koruba) has a bizarre problem: He’s too brainy. Not that I don’t understand how overwhelming intelligence can play havoc with peer relations (having had some firsthand experience with that in my youth, ahem ahem), but Simon is a good-looking fellow with a decent haircut, he dresses well, and if he show a tendency to spout trivia in complex sentences, he still doesn’t come across as the kind of nerd who is commonly ostracized in junior high. Yet even when he buys a barrel of chocolate ice cream and treats the entire cafeteria in an effort just to get someone to like him, he has no takers. Not even cute Emily (Amanda Fuller), on whom he has his eye, though she begs off politely because she already had some dessert, and it’s never too early to develop a complex about your still-developing figure, ladies.

Where did Simon get the money for the ice cream? He scooped it all out of a wishing fountain where he had dropped it originally, wishing day after day for a single friend with no results. (Hmm… Wishing… friend… genie… If only I could see how these plot threads could possibly relate to one another!)

Do Legos make you smart, or do smart people like Legos? These and other imponderable questions…

So bereft of friendship is Simon that he can’t even get any classmates to respond to invitations to his birthday party. The only attendees are his mother (Stacie Randall of Puppetmaster 4 and Trancers 4 and 5), recently widowed but still young and pretty; her new fiancée Josh (Dean Scofield); and the magician they hired to entertain – one “Dopler the Great,” who’s trying to make a living with his knowledge of ritual and prestidigitation. Unfortunately, Simon’s so darned encyclopedic that he knows how every one of Dopler’s tricks is performed, and even stops him from swallowing a sword incorrectly. Flustered, and humiliated, Dopler leaves in a hurry, leaving behind several of his props… including a certain dirt-encrusted lamp.

Well, of COURSE it’s dirt-encrusted. Because if a magical lamp weren’t dirty or tarnished or otherwise in need of a cleaning, no one would ever rub it. But Simon does, and instantly has his very own genie (Tom Fahn), a very friendly and eager-to-please genie who’s awful pleased to be out of the lamp for the first time in millennia. On the other hand, he’s a little rusty, not having used his powers for so long, so when he finally convinces the fiercely-rational Simon to try out his wishes, well..

As they say, “wackiness ensues.”

“At least I’ll blend in with the color scheme.”

In addition to being somewhat inexact in his spellcasting prowess (a wish to be “filthy rich” results in Simon only being filthy), the genie delivers the punchline in each of a long line of horrendous “fish out of water” pop-cultural jokes, mistaking such phrases as “wave of the future,” “train of thought,” etc. Such misunderstandings are not only strained but inconsistent, as the genie manages to communicate in colloquial English with great ease whenever the plot doesn’t require him to provide a cheap laugh. On the other hand, the genie is the most relaxed character in the cast, coming across as if Robin Williams and Howie Mandel were whipped into a puree and then spread really really thin across the story (because with those guys, a little goes a long way).

So for a while, Simon keeps experimenting with the genie’s wishes in order to become more popular, with generally backfiring results; meanwhile, Dopler, who comes to realize that the genie of the lamp is out and active, tries to get “his” lamp back. In general, the plot machinations aren’t nearly as obvious and telegraphed as in, say, Little Ghost. Compare, for example, the mom’s boyfriends in each movie: In Little Ghost it was obvious that he was an over-the-top slimeball and moneygrubber, while here Josh is just slightly overbearing but not cartoonish until it’s revealed that he, too, is really in the relationship only for the hefty life insurance policy payout. That pretty much holds true for most of the writing in this movie; if not original or fresh, it’s at least whimsical and energetic.

“Excuse me, but if Jackie O’s not going to be wearing it, somebody ought to.”

And it has to be, to overcome what seems to me to be a plot hamstrung by some bad initial decisions. First off, the genie grants Simon unlimited wishes (explained as being a reaction to competition in the wish-granting business from leprechauns, fairies, etc.). I suppose that gives us an opportunity to see several smaller wishes granted or mis-granted, rather than three humongous wishes (probably much kinder to the budget, as well). On the other hand, the three-wishes rule gives satisfying symmetry to most stories involving genies. Without that scaffold, the plot structure here founders until the second half is largely filled Simon and the genie running around a castle full of hostile soldiers (the result of Simon wishing to be a king, and then wishing not to be a king anymore); what first seems like a minor episode takes over the story, and one gets the impression that it is allowed to do so simply because nobody had any better idea where to go with the movie Then Dr. Farrow calls out military might to get his hands on the lamp, and it’s only by the agency of gal-pal Emily – remember her? – that Simon gets sufficient kid power to snatch the genie back. (I should point out, in case it’s escaped you, that Emily liked Simon just fine in the beginning, and nothing he did via the genie’s magic helped to “win” her.)

On the other hand, I really can’t castigate too severely a plot which, however unstructured, lead us to a conclusion involving someone wearing a monster suit that crosses a snake with a scorpion.

One word: Compensating.

If you’ve seen enough of these movies (or as in my case, far far too many of them), you’ll note early on the telltale signs of the Romanian shooting locations for a story set in America. However, if you have to shoot your low-budget movie at Castel Film’s studio, you could make far worse use of your resources than this production did. The standing “American suburban” sets are painted with an odd set of flat bright colors, so the costumes for this movie extended the color scheme, with Mom’s wardrobe especially also containing plenty of “retro” flourishes to make the whole seem like a cohesive production design. And if there’s one place where you want to shoot a scene in which a medieval castle abuts a suburban cul-de-sac, it’s at Castel Film, where the medieval castle DOES abut the suburban cul-de-sac. With the well thought-out use of such production resources, and the absolute minimum number of speaking parts going to local extras who have to be redubbed, the production location and the attendant budgetary strictures that implies might be invisible to the casual viewer. (Ah, I remember when I was a casual viewer…)

There are certainly better genie movies out there, even ones aimed at a juvenile market (I’m thinking of a big one made by The Mouse a few years previous), but the standard against which this movie should be compared are the rest of the crop of Full Moon/Kushner-Locke kidvids pumped out around the same time. By those standards, The Incredible Genie does well in its peer bracket.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Biff Manard (Dr. Farrow) played “Ruffian” in the TNG episode “Elementary, Dear Data”