aka The Boy With the X-Ray Eyes

• Directed by Jeff Burr
• Written by Jeff Burr and Scott Phillips
• Starring
  • Bryan Neal
  • Dara Hollingsworth
  • Dennis Haskins
  • Eric Jungmann
  • Dan Zukovic
• Produced by Kirk Edward Hansen and Vlad Paunescu
• Executive produced by Donald Kushner and Peter Locke (and Charles Band, uncredited)

Originally shot in 1999 as The Boy With the X-Ray Eyes, this movie finally saw distribution half a decade later through cheap dollar-store distrib Tango Entertainment under the title X-Treme Teens. An even more honest title would have been Yet Another Damned Excuse to Run Around the Suburban Cul-de-Sac Set and Wooded Lot at Castel Film With No Budget, but I can see how marketing would have shot that suggestion down. It’s not stultifying in its rote conception and production as its contemporary Train Quest (2001) (a movie that suffered a similar path to eventual distribution), but the script never seems to have gotten past the brainstorming stage, with the better ideas buried under events that never exploit the central concept for its story potential.

For the first twenty minutes, you’d have trouble guessing what the central concept is anyway. The entire first act is taken up with the ever-so-standard setup to be found in young-adult movies, and especially in the Kushner-Locke production canon: teen Andy (Bryan Neal) has just moved into that familiar cul-de-sac with his mother (um, I don’t think she’s credited), his little brother Cameron (Gabi Robert Kerekesh), and his new stepdad John (Timothy Bottoms, star of That’s My Bush!), who’s brought the family from Chicago so he can accept a position at Vectrocomp. Andy’s got the standard ambivalent thing going with his stepfather, and being shoved into a new school in the middle of the semester is almost as aggravating – especially because the first two classmates he meets are the chortling bully and his toady, who fire off provocative insults with Romanian lips that rarely match the American post-production looping. (Okay, that last is an aggravation more for me than for Andy, but…) The only two civil people Andy falls in with are Sam (Eric Jungmann), a UFO conspiracy nut, and his gal-pal Iris (Dara Hollingsworth).

Gaah! I’m starting to recognize even the forests around Bucharest!

Twenty minutes in, the plot – such as it is – kicks into gear, when Andy’s science class (taught by Jeff Burr, the director) goes on a field trip to Vectrocomp, a trip made at the invitation of Malcolm (Andrew Prine), CEO of Vectrocomp, trying behind the scenes to help John’s relationship with his stepson by making Dad’s job seem cooler and worth the social dislocation. My own guess is that Dad’s job would seem a lot cooler if the location shoot for Vectrocomp hadn’t been in some historical building, with plexiglass handrails and electronic keypad doorlocks stuck onto aged marble stairs and distressed wooden wainscoting.

Oh, what’s Dad’s job, you ask? He and his work partner Boyd (Dennis Haskins of Saved By the Bell) spend their days troubleshooting a pair of X-ray goggles, a prop that attempts to prove the proposition that “any kitbashed conglomeration looks futuristic if spraypainted silver.” It’s not an alien artifact or a piece of foreign technology being reverse-engineered; Malcolm put this prototype together, and other scientists have spent months trying to figure out why it’s not working right. Methinks that Vectrocomp needs to revise their R&D workflow a little.

Gosh, doesn’t every high-power tech company have moss growing in its parking lot?

So. Andy’s on the premises with his class, says hello to his stepdad, and then is accosted by Sam and Iris, because Sam is hot to find out the rumors of crashed saucer remains and such stowed in Vectrocomp’s labs. Just for the heck of it (and because it’s a move sure to reduce tension with his stepfather), Andy leads them into the secured areas with the keypad codes he saw over his father’s shoulder. A side note on security: Along with the keycode on the pads rather shakily affixed to the walls (don’t want to damage the shooting location, you know), the one has to whistle a certain phrase of music for the lock to open. That’s an idea that should seem cool for all of twenty seconds before being deflated by the thought process. Not only does it require a faculty that not everyone has all their lives (as demonstrated by stepdad John, who has to try three times before can whistle clearly enough for the computer to accept it), but it’s a “security” measure that one can’t help but expose to everyone in earshot (again, as demonstrated by John; that’s how Andy learned the code, by hearing his stepdad try repeatedly to get back into the lab).

The trio of explorers doesn’t find a saucer; what they do find are 1) corridors which have the company logo plastered on them at every conceivable juncture, lest the security-cleared employees forget what company they work for; and 2) John and Boyd’s lab, conveniently empty. It only takes a minute for Andy to correct some elementary math errors displayed on Boyd’s console, and presto! The goggles now work! Why, John and Boyd and Malcolm don’t know whether to arrest them or commend them! (Actually, Boyd knows which he’d rather do to the punk kid who showed up his math error. And for spite and other reasons, when everyone else’s back is turned, he stuffs the goggles into Andy’s backpack.)

“And if I wear this to the Prom, no one will see the massive zit between my eyebrows!”

Now, you’d like to think that X-ray hijinks will follow. Even with this a safe PG-ish movie (although it never did get an official rating), which puts the kibosh on the “looking at pritty gurls” idea, you can have fun with this. Or you could. This movie doesn’t. Yes, when Andy discovers the goggles, he puts them on and sees people’s bones and stuff. But then his problems overwhelm the possibilities; for one thing, the goggles cloak themselves (!), so that the actor doesn’t have to stumble around blind with this nonfunctional prop on his face. For another, they decide to bond themselves to his head, so he can’t take them off. For a third, Sam immediately loses the detached remote control that governs the goggles’ power level. That leaves Andy wandering around for the middle section of the movie effectively blind (or overwhelmed by sight, which is the same thing), while Sam and Iris try to find the remote and get the goggles off of him. Meanwhile, John is arrested as the likely thief.

But wait, there’s more! The goggles also function as the McGuffin; Boyd was secretly a military plant at Vectrocomp (though in this case “the military” seems to be about thirty people in a single underground base), and had purposely been messing up the X-ray functions of the goggles until he could find out the science behind the cloaking technology, since I guess the military has no use for X-ray vision. (That’s more of a CIA thing, I guess.) He put the goggles in Andy’s bag to smuggle them out, and now he’s trying to grab Andy to get them back and give them to his liaison, Lt. Biddle (Dan Zukovic).

“I can see through my brain!”

It isn’t until Andy gets the out-of-the-blue idea to take the fight to the military (fight? What fight? You have no weapons!) to protect himself and clear his stepdad’s good name that he finally starts using his X-ray vision to better-than-lousy effect, and by that time it’s too late to really grab our interest. (And I repeat, “We’ll take the find to them” makes absolutely no sense when “them” is a rogue military cell with guns and stuff.)

Along the way, there are signs that co-writers Jeff Burr and Scott Phillips were at least amusing themselves; Sam’s constant string of pop-culture conspiracy and sci-fi geek references doesn’t come off as forced and desperate as most such gimmicks do. Unlike just about every corporate officer (especially in the tech industry) in the movies, Malcolm isn’t a complete prat; heck, he originally designed the goggles to correct the vision of his blind wife (and the cloak, one assumes, was an afterthought to keep her from being pointed at every time she left the house). And there are a few lines here and there to show that they toyed with echoes of Roger Corman’s X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963). But such moments of fun are overshadowed by the arbitrary nature of the majority of the plot elements – not the least of which is an underground (literally) military installation which uses signage, laser tripwires, and hordes of armed soldiers for above-ground security instead of a simple barbed-wire fence.

“Boy, this top-secret military installation is even more high-tech than my dad’s workplace!”

As a final side note (because where better to veer to the side than at the conclusion?): I rarely criticize the packaging of the movies I watch, but in this case, the back-cover synopsis is emblematic of the shoddy care taken in the belated distribution that this movie rated.

An unidentified flying object touches down on planet Earth. Its alien crew disembark. Their quest? To retrieve a crash-landed probe before it self-destructs. Light years from home, they need help and chance upon Andy, a teenager only too willing to join them in their race against time.

The missing probe lies hidden deep within the corporate HQ of Andy’s dad’s business and, given the power of x-ray vision by his newfound friends from outer space, Andy is soon hot on its trail. But hindered by a particularly obnoxious alien assistant, it’s going to take all the ingenuity Andy can muster to make this mission impossible possible…

You may have noticed the absence of aliens from my review, stemming entirely from their absence from the movie. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed the movie here synopsized more than the one I watched; it’s a passable plot, though that doesn’t count for much once it gets ground up in the Kushner-Locke sausage factory. But you’d like to think that someone realized they had maybe a first draft one-pager from the earliest days of the movie’s development, wouldn’t you? It’s hard to trust a distributor that doesn’t ever watch the movies it puts out.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve been on Star Trek: 1
  • Andrew Prine (Malcolm) played “Administrator” in the TNG episode “Frame of Mind,” and “Legate Turrell” in the DS9 episode “Life Support”