WEIRD SCIENCE TAB MOVIE
WEIRD SCIENCE TAB SERIES

A lot of loud male braying ensues, but it’s mostly a veneer: the macho antics of all the male characters are either dissuaded or punctured by the film’s end. Lisa/LeBrock must shepherd the heroes out of the labyrinth of these punishing alpha male role models so that they might make their own way in the sexual world-one that might see them wooing Deb (Suzanne Snyder) and Hilly (Judie Aronson), who were similarly duped into buying into the machoness of boyfriends Max and Ian and are now looking to cash out. The boys’ master-tormentors are a couple of popular bullies named Max (Robert Rusler) and Ian (Robert Downey Jr.), who take pleasure in humilating them in underwear-and-slurpee oriented ways an added bonus is Gary’s brother Chet (Bill Paxton, selling it), for whom the chief virtue of a military education is its enabling of cruelty and extortion.

WEIRD SCIENCE TAB MOVIE

The rest of the movie whirls around her grounded goddess as her creators do thoughtless things she’s forever correcting, hoping to wean them off of her necessity while fending off those who stupidly extend it.

She needs all of it, as Lisa’s mission makes her the calm eye of a storm of male hostility unprecedented in the Hughes oeuvre. This is one of the few overtly-sexualized pop characters who is not on the bottom rung of the movie, and it’s in large part due to LeBrock’s restraint and compassion. LeBrock, who had previously starred in The Woman in Red as Gene Wilder’s own pointless fantasy girl, is a triumph: I can’t think of another actor, especially one stuck in male-wish-fulfillment roles, who could have played it with such serene confidence. A combination of hacked military hardware and supernatural assistance helps to call forth Lisa (Kelly LeBrock), a bombshell goddess hot enough to be worshipped and smart enough to know that that’s a bad idea. Thus Gary is helpless when, on the eve of his parents’ fateful trip away from home, Wyatt decrees that they will build a virtual-reality sexpot. Wyatt (Anthony Michael Hall) is a would-be macho motormouth who is always signing verbal checks he can’t cash his best friend Gary (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) is a sheepish boy who can’t raise the courage to open an account. John Hughes neither indulges its heroes’ need to hide in a fantasy of mastery nor chide them for dreaming it up in the first place: he recognizes that circumstance led them into a cul-de-sac that can only be escaped through self-reliance. Weird Science awkwardly captures the sexual frustration and compensatory hostility of nerdboys in heat like no other film at the time, and its dissection of the self-hating shortcuts many boys take to protect their egos is surprisingly evenhanded. hedged on their status of normal or outcast, the better to let the audience write themselves into the plot, WS made no bones about the heroes’ misfit sorrows, thus slashing the prospective audience while winning my heart. Whereas the goofball dreamer kids of Spielberg et al. Weird Science is one of those “oh yeah!” movies, and captured my imagination for obvious, sunken-chested reasons: it was an unabashedly nerds-rule affair. It was the summer of such offside items as Joe Dante’s indefinable Explorers, Matthew Robbins’ weird rebel riff The Legend of Billie Jean (still waiting for that DVD), Dan O’Bannon’s sharply-written The Return of the Living Dead, Tobe Hooper’s camp howler Lifeforce, Martha Coolidge’s science prodigy exposé Real Genius and, of course, the immortal Better Off Dead, the mention of which still gets me more excited “oh yeah!” reactions than those of the year’s foregone conclusions.

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Love them or hate them (and I seriously dug every one), they didn’t incite long-term worship then and don’t cry out for exegesis now.įor me, the meagre significance of ’85 rests on its series of I-can’t-believe-I’m-the-only-one-who-likes-this movies, stuff that would click with a few like-minded individuals without whipping the turnstiles into a blur (while snowballing into cults on cable and VHS). The monster hits were all pretty tame: Back to the Future is a comic riff on Speilbergian awe rather than a traumatic dirge on childhood loss, Rambo II boilerplate Reaganism without variation, A View to a Kill a pathetically lazy James Bond clunker, Cocoon a space film by Ron Howard. The previous year’s glut of money-spinning classics had raised the bar so high that a letdown was inevitable: as I recall, there was a big dropoff in attendance and a series of titles that failed to define an era. I don’t remember the summer of 1985 as a crucial moment in my filmic development.

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