- Produced and directed by Fred Olen Ray
- Written by William C. Martell
- Starring
- Dee Wallace-Stone
- Barry Livingston
- Trenton Knight
- Russ Tamblyn
I quite like Bill Martell. I mean personally. I’ve had occasion to correspond with him on several occasions, and he seems to be a great guy with an incredible joie de vivre. He also runs one of the most useful sites for screenwriters, Script Secrets, which features practical and insightful daily writing tips, as well as message boards that are awash in great ideas and inspiration. Bill is a wonderful teacher; he’s got great insight into what makes a script work.
But then again, there’s this movie. It’s very much cast in the mold of Honey I Shrunk the Kids/Honey I Blew Up the Kid, but definitely comes up lacking.
Josh Griffin (Trenton Knight) is at that awkward junior-high age, which in movie terms means he’s got a girl he likes and a bully who’s giving him grief. He’s also got a dad (Barry Livingston) who’s an inventor for Applied Technologies, and a mom who’s Dee Wallace-Stone. (Well, what else can I say about her? I mean, it’s not like we see her going to work, but keeping house after one child is kind of light work for a homemaker…) Mom is kind of a rare breed in cinema: A parent who tells her child, “If you’re in the wrong, back down — but if you’re right, stand up for yourself.” None of this namby “Ooh, violence doesn’t solve anything” crap that I hear spouted by people who apparently sprang full-grown from the head of Zeus and never went to gradeschool. (Me, I’m teaching my kids, “There are problems that violence doesn’t solve, and problems that violence does solve — make sure you’re using the right tool for the right job. And while I don’t want you starting fights, you have my permission and blessing to finish them.”)
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Beakers! Nothing says “science” like beakers! |
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Apparently Dad Griffin needed a mom like his wife, because he’s a non-confrontational type, which means that his boss at work, Dr. Woorter (Russ Tamblyn) both insults him for being a slacker, then steals his inventions and presents them to the military as his own, making manymany bucks. Dad’s not going to stand up to his boss, though (he even tries to give Josh the “Fighting never solves anything” crap before Mom gently contradicts him). Mom gives him an non-confrontational solution, then; why not invent something here at home, so Woorter will have no claim on it?
A great idea, so Dad starts working in his basement lab, mixing beakers of Kool-Aid and dry ice — whoops, I mean really important chemicals and stuff. And after a couple of false starts, he comes up with his great invention: An invisibility potion! He tests it on the dog, and yup, the dog disappears.
He keeps this a secret even from his family for a couple of days as he tests and stuff, which gives the invisible dog time to get Josh in trouble (making messes, unmaking beds, etc.) to the point that Mom grounds him. And somehow she forgets to lift the grounding when Dad finally reveals that the dog’s right here, folks! Look at that dog collar walking around by itself!
And since he’s still grounded, he won’t be able to ask that special girl out to the sci-fi double feature on Saturday, and when the bully teases that he’s going to ask her out instead, well, that’s the last straw. Josh and his friend Skeeter get into the invisibility potion in the basement, testing it first with an eyedropper on Skeeter’s iguana (yeah, just what we need — invisible lizards running around under foot). But then Mom interrupts, and in desperation Josh squirts the remainder of the eyedropper into his RC Cola. She gently kicks Skeeter out (’cause Josh is still grounded, you know), and confiscates the RC Cola. And before Josh can sneak it back, Mom gets thirsty, and well…
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Welcome to the Witness Protection Program. |
There she goes.
Now, I’ve been pretty okay with things up to this point. Sure, there’s been some distressingly bad technobabble in the Applied Technologies lab, and the “invisible dog” effects were notably primitive, but those are pretty much par for the course. But from here on out, we start piling up annoyances. One annoyance is ignorable; a couple can be ignored with some effort; but after a while, the sheer weight of the combined annoyances really detracts and distracts.
See, Dad hadn’t come up with an antidote yet, so he takes a sample of the formula to work to take advantage of the computers and greater supply of chemicals. But then Woorter gets wind of the project, so Dad has to break his test tube to keep Woorter from getting his hands on it. Woorter then cans him and calls security to drag Dad away.
But then Josh gives Dad the “stand up for yourself” speech — which is okay, except by the end it takes the odd permutation of “You have the right to break into the laboratory!” Okay, now, time out! Did I mention that this is a kid’s movie? I’m all for putting strong moral messages in kid vids, and I like the “stand up for yourself” idea, but we’ve just crossed the line into a highly questionable moral.
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What is it with the product placements in these invisibility movies? |
So the next day, Saturday, Dad and Josh go back to the lab to “clean out his desk,” made easy by the fact that Dad still has his keys. WHAT?!?!? He was fired from a (supposed) defense contractor lab and declared “banned for life,” and nobody took his keys? And security will just allow a terminated and quite possibly disgruntled employee back in to “clean out his desk” without even having someone hovering over his shoulder?
In security’s favor, they do call Woorter at home, so Josh and Dad are on a time budget to find an antidote — and just as they think they’ve got it (testing it on the iguana to be sure), Woorter and the security guy burst in. And then — get this — when Dad pleads to Woorter, “My wife is invisible! You’ve got to let me work on the antidote!” Woorter uses that as evidence that Dad is unstable and has the State Mental folks come and pick him up, and drag Josh off to an orphanage. WHAT?!?!? The State will lock up nonviolent private citizens on the say-so of their bosses? They’ll trundle a child off to an orphanage without even checking to see if there’s a second parent to take care of him? Hell, the first and only word Mom gets that anything’s amiss is when the orphanage allows Josh a single phone call.
So Mom grabs a cab to the lab to try and find the antidote herself, but that’s exactly what Woorter was planning on, because he needs a living specimen of the formula to show the boys at the Pentagon. He catches her, and his deal to her is that, if she cooperates and allows herself to be transported to Washington in a crate, he’ll have her husband and son released. WHAT?!?!? Let’s see how many implausibilities we have here: 1) That the Pentagon will take kindly to one of its civilian contractors kidnapping a private citizen and shipping her like livestock. 2) That Woorter’s got the kind of far-reaching civic powers that he can, with a word, have people released from state institutions at will.
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Well, the particle mask is an innovation. |
The annoyances are really stacking up by this point.
Hey, I’ve got to leave some surprises for you, in case you ever watch this, but the ending revolves around a competency hearing like they have in some completely dissimilar parallel universe. But yes, order (and visibility) is eventually restored, good is rewarded, evil is punished, and all is right with the world.
Oh, did you miss the girl ‘n’ bully subplot in there? It ended about halfway through, when the bully (who’s also the Griffins’ paperboy — have you ever met a bully paperboy?) gets slapped by the invisible Mom. (There’s some slight mention at that point that Mom is therefore cruising around the house with nothing on, but thankfully they don’t go too far down that particular road.) And that’s it. Neither bully nor girl are ever brought up again.
But it’s not surprising that minor characters get lost in the shuffle, as the major ones do too. I never was able to figure out who the actual protagonist was; obviously, Mom was the title character, but she was very little involved in either the onset of her problem or its solution, and spent too much of the time in between being passive. Josh was the instigator of the action, but he wasn’t really as involved in the solution, and as for any “character arc” he might have had, well, that was short-circuited about halfway through when Mom took care of his bully problem for him. Dad does most of the running around, but the resolution of his problem at the competency hearing is mostly taken care of by Mom and her invisible hijinks. I suppose I’d put the protagonist hat on Dad, but the fact that I have to dissect it this much to find the protagonist is yet another annoyance for the pile.
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Where Maria Ford and Rick Dean live between shoots. |
Oh, and how did I forget to mention Mrs. Pringle (Stella Stevens), the neighborhood’s Mrs. Kravitz-wannabe who watches the Griffin household with her binoculars while her husband reads the paper? Did we not have enough cliches here without this one tacked on?
Now, as I said, I like Bill Martell, and I think he’s a good writer. So it bothered me that I had so many issues with this movie. After I wrote the basic draft of this review, I asked him what he thought of the movie and its production. Among other things, he said the following:
The original script was about a WORKING mom who was invisible to her husband and kid - they took her for granted. After the line producer has scheduled the whole shoot, Andrew [the producer] finally got around to reading the script (or maybe just the coverage) and came up with a list of changes. First - she doesn’t work. He wanted mom to be more of a June Cleaver type and less of a realistic mom. Next, he wanted the kid & dad NOT to take her for granted (there goes the character arcs for both of them). Also - originally the script was written for 3 days of Dee Wallace Stone on camera (rest is VO when she’s invisible) but Dee really liked the script, said she’d work more days. Andrew said - show Mom more. (”But she’s INVISIBLE!” “Then make her visible!”) That’s why she saves the day instead of the son & dad saving the day (and coming to appreciate her). Whole rewrite had to be done in less than a week, then it was immedeately shot. I was doing rewrites on Night Hunter for Ashok at the same time, got no sleep, and had walking pneumonia (sp) when we shot the Teamster #2 scenes. Other things that went wrong on that film - we shot at the Van Nuys Sewage Treatment plant which has a HUGE high tech lab… but the location person rented the wrong lab (this little one) and we didn’t discover it until we showed up to film. We also didn’t get access to their computer room- with this huge computer from 1970s movies (so our “super computer” was a lap top). . . .
The film was shot in 2 weeks (including FX days shot in a studio). I don’t think you can shoot a movie that fast and have it turn out good. Too many things went wrong (etc). But my nieces loved it.
Fred is a great guy. He always tries to make the best movie with whatever he’s given. He LIKES movies. The only “negative” thing I can say about him is that he and I have totally different visual styles (he likes to set up the camera and have the actors move, I like to move the camera), but that’s an artistic difference. On the last day of shooting Fred buys a bottle of champagne for everyone on the crew out of HIS pay check. He’s also funny. . . . I like Fred more than any other director I’ve worked with (to date). He actually fought for my script on MOM when Andrew finally gave us his notes.
Since Bill pretty much addressed every one of my problems with the final project (without seeing my review), I think I can shuffle any blame from him and onto director Fred Olen Ray and even more onto producer Andrew Stevens. And if we can condense all the transgressions into one venial sin of children’s movies, it is this: Making them “just for kids,” and forgetting that parents are going to be watching these things too. Take a good children’s movie, like The Iron Giant, for instance; it’s certainly aimed at the juvenile set, but there’s nothing precluding it from being enjoyed by the parents too, or even childless adults. It’s just plain good cinema, regardless of age group. Invisible Mom, by contrast, cuts all sorts of plot and production corners with the apparent attitude that, hey, we don’t have to make it good; it’s just for kids, after all.
Well, it’s true. My kids enjoyed it, just like Bill’s nieces. But I’m the one that rents tapes, and I’m the one that buys them, and I’m probably not going to do either for this one.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 0
- breasts: 0 (I mean, technically, they’re supposed to be present, since Mom’s running around naked and all, but…)
- explosions: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 2
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
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