Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.

Review #2318: Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.

Cast: 

Jon Voight (Bill Biscane/Kane), Scott Baio (Stan Bobbins), Vanessa Angel (Jean Bobbins), Skyler Shaye (Kylie), Leo, Connor and Christopher Lewis (Baby Kahuna), Justin Chatwin (Zack), Peter Wingfield (Crowe), Shaun Sipos (Brandon), Thomas Kretschmann (Roscoe), Stefanie von Pfetten (Jennifer Kraft), with Gerry and Myles Fitzgerald (Kahuna; voiced by David A. Kaye), Max and Michael Iles (Archie; voiced by Danny McKinnon), Jared and Jordan Scheideman (Finkleman (voiced by Jonathan Singleton), Maia and Keana Bastidas (Rosita (voiced by Melissa Montoya), and Joshua and Maxwell Lockhart (Alex; voiced by Rashad Hood) Directed by Bob Clark (#020 - A Christmas Story, #679 - Black Christmas, #1055 - Porky's, #1854 - My Summer Story, #2149 - Baby Geniuses)

Review: 

There really is no point in saying the obvious, but the original Baby Geniuses (1999) was a semi-success with audiences despite its ungodly idea of having babies that talk with mouth morphing. The only souls alive that really wanted another of these films must've loved the power of the dollar and also thought audiences really would be stupid enough to go with it a second time. You might remember that the genesis for what became the first film was partially at the hands of Jon Voight, who had sprung the idea of a script that had been done about intelligent babies, and that Voight showed a proof-of-concept film about babies sitting around talking. Of course, Clark eventually fiddled with things to be more about corporate intrigue for the movie that escaped onto theaters (the rare occasion when direct-to-video might have served this crap better). Voight, who was an executive producer on the film, now serves as the chief adult star to go along with one person returning from the last film. Gregory Poppen wrote the screenplay while Steven Paul (one of the people responsible for the last film's script) wrote the story and produced the film. Paul apparently really fought for the film when it came to the dawdling of actually releasing it, since as quoted by Voight, he was the who kept "awareness of it up." Truly inspiring. I can imagine that Now & Forever (2002), the only theatrical effort Clark did between the Baby Geniuses films that closed out his career before his untimely death, could be better. There were no more of these movies in theaters, but Voight appeared in three Baby Geniuses movies for the direct-to-video market. Tragically, Clark died in 2007 at the age of 67 in a head-on car crash, with this being his last feature film.

Now you have super babies with super strength to go along with brother reveals and plans about TVs making kids stay inside the house (nowadays you might as well worry about the iPads seeping one's attention span). It isn't particularly worthy to get mad and launch a comprehensive review about how this manages to be worse than the original, one that might make you wonder if you could give a -1 rating to a movie. The whole movie just seems unnatural, ugly and lifeless in ways that even mediocre movies blow out of the water in terms of actual entertainment value. Nothing changed in the five years from the first film to make one believe babies could be funny talking except for the people making it. I wonder how they came up with the idea of an apparently immortal being that will be stuck in the body of a three-year old baby that goes around protecting kids in his weird lair. Voight must've been watching too many movies about German-speaking doctors and thought it would be a neat bit for this film. There may have been movies in Voight's past and present that were actually effective, but this is clearly not one of them for a movie that would've been great to crush in the Berlin Wall. Baio has exactly one film credit that I remember with Bugsy Malone (1976), which had child actors play adult roles, incidentally. The nicest way to describe him here is "vacant". Shaye gives it a go for a movie that offers one nothing beyond a check. You know those cheesy b-movies that maybe don't have the effects or all-around acting to get the whole way across the finish line? Superbabies proves that having money ($20 million apparently) to pair Academy Award winning actors with effects made from the backside of God is not everything. Let's just throw out some words to call the movie to at least practice some alliteration for "education" about the movie: Incoherent, incompetent, insane, insecure, idiotic, ignominious, ignorant. I would rather see someone feed AI this crap just to see how it would respond to getting soullessness for a prompt (editor's note: do not do this).

Hell, I've run out of bile, so in the tradition of Thanksgiving, let me just repurpose old material for you: Getting kids (age 5-9, apparently) rather than adult voices to voice the babies (such as say, Look Who's Talking [1989]) is probably the least sad thing of the whole thing. What could possibly invite you to waste 95 minutes on a movie that never succeeds in every joke that is attempted? If there was a God, I do not believe that watching babies walk and talk would be high on the priority list. You might as well call it the film most likely to be thought of as having no soul in it. The people who made this film probably did not think much of the film either during or after production, but that doesn't give an excuse for this being one of the worst things I have ever seen. Hell, it shouldn't even be called a film, it should be put in a special garbage can that you would put expired food products in. You might think, oh, well, Monster a Go-Go (1965) is filled with more inconsistencies and worse acting. Well, maybe, but that has the label of being made in weirder circumstances of "make the best out of the footage", what kind of excuse does this Hollywood slop have? Absolutely none. Clark and his team probably thought it was one of those things you can put on for the kids and enjoy, but no, they did not. It's easy to say folks are mailing it in, but, well, yea, they are mailing it in as if this was a direct-to-video production, complete with little motivation to do much of anything. They repeat one line four times in quick succession and later do a repeat of a gag where an adult gets tricked into getting hit in the beans after talking about it. The voices coming out of those babies were never going to work with how it looked because it just isn't a useful effect that you would want to see for very long. It is a gag that has run amok for what might as well count for anti-comedy. Truly, this was a sad experience to sit through, because it means that Bob Clark may be one of few people who directed both a vaunted classic and a horrendously awful feature in the same career. Avoid, unless you like garbage.

Overall, I give it 0 out of 10 stars.

Next up: Black Friday gives you relief in boredom with the return of W. Lee Wilder and The Snow Creature.

Bugsy Malone.

Review #1951: Bugsy Malone.

Cast: 

Scott Baio (Bugsy Malone), Florrie Dugger (Blousey Brown), Jodie Foster (Tallulah), John Cassisi (Fat Sam Staccetto), Martin Lev (Dandy Dan), Paul Murphy (Leroy Smith), Sheridan Earl Russell (Knuckles), Albin 'Humpty' Jenkins (Fizzy), Paul Chirelstein (Smolsky), Andrew Paul (O'Dreary), Jeffrey Stevens (Louis), Donald Waugh (Snake Eyes), Peter Holder (Ritzy), Michael Kirkby (Angelo), and Dexter Fletcher (Baby Face) Directed by Alan Parker.

Review: 

"It was a lunatic idea that one would only attempt at the beginning of a career, infused as it is with such ingenuousness, yet also with almost manic, devotion. Looking back after all this time, it’s easy to see that we must have been crazy even to have attempted it, but curiously, back in 1975, it never occurred to us for a moment that such an absurd creative notion would not work. As for the impossibly difficult logistics of actually filming it, that too eluded us."

Alan Parker was born in Islington, London, England with no aspirations to become a director. His first profession was in advertising, which he entered in 1962 when he was not even twenty years old. By 1968, he had gone from copywriting to directing TV advertisements. One of his numerous employers was Collett Dickenson Pearce, where he met David Puttnam and Alan Marshall, who each proved key in helping to produce this film years later. In fact, it was Puttnam that encouraged him to write what became his first screenplay in Melody (1971). He did a widely appreciated play on television with The Evacuees in 1975. Over time, he had written a handful of scripts, but most were rejected because they were deemed "too parochial" or "too English". Undaunted by this, he thus decided to write a script that seemed "American", despite having little knowledge of the country besides a few trips there to shoot commercials...but he did know American movies. The script that became this film was one inspired by the stories he told to his children to keep them occupied on journeys spent in the car, which involved gangsters and showgirls in New York. It was his eldest son who insisted that the characters were children. Parker did a tour of classrooms all throughout the States to go along with trips around American Air Force bases. Kids were cast from all around to the point where nearly 10,000 kids were seen in a cast that ultimately ended up being around 200 (with respective paperwork needing to be done for licenses, medical approvals, and you get the idea). Most of the filming was done at Pinewood Studios. So, we have a gangster film that is told with children that involves kids being splurged with cream (through the power of illusion, the guns shown shooting doughnut cream is actually done by editing shots of the gun shooting ping-pong balls to go with someone off-camera throwing cream at the actors). Parker described the film thirty years later as one where he has "ambivalent feelings of pride and embarrassment", one that seems quite different from the later films that Parker directed, although the mixed success of the film with audiences (a hit in the United Kingdom and less so in America) probably did not help. At any rate, he wrote a version of the film for use with amateur productions (which he took well), and a handful of stage productions have occurred since Parker's writing of the music book for a West End production in 1983. Over time he felt that as the years went by, the film still looked modern to him without looking dated and therefore was one he was proud of. Over the next three decades, Parker directed fourteen films, which included Midnight Express (1978), Mississippi Burning (1988), and Evita (1996); Parker retired in 2003 and died in 2020 at the age of 76.

It is indeed an odd film, but it is one that achieves the ideal any director would strive for: spontaneity. This is a film where Parker got exactly who he wanted for a palatable modern feel to a 1920s sound with Paul Williams as music composer, which means one hears kid actors having adults dub their voice for the songs in this gangster musical. It is that lives and dies on the effect generated by seeing a familiar story turned into amusement by seeing it with energy and all-around style that means one isn't going to be reminded of a glossier version of The Terror of Tiny Town (1938) or The Little Rascals. It isn't a movie that rides a joke down to the ground and stays there, instead being a film that earnestly has fun with committing to being a celebration of the gangster and musical genre that is pleasant. It is a movie that ends with a quality pie fight, how can one go wrong? Baio wanted to be on television when he was a kid, which resulted in a few commercials, but by the time he was approached to read the script for this film, he threw the script down and left - this show of spirit evidently won him the part, which was his first film role. He clearly is having a good time here with a role that encourages a bit of screwball zip without turning into sappy parody. Dugger was cast originally in a small role, but when the original actress cast for the female lead opposite Baio developed a growth spurt, Dugger became the lead in what became her only feature role (instead opting for a job in the military as a medical administrator and later ophthalmology). She proves fine for a role of mostly cliches, where chemistry isn't really important when the stakes are mostly kid hijinks. Cassisi was cast as a result of Parker's tour of classrooms all throughout the States (specifically a Brooklyn Catholic school) - when Parker asked a classroom who was the most badly behaved kid in the class, they all responded with Cassisi, and he is pretty amusing in a role that is basically the ham, which is generally amusing when paired against the other "kid boss" in Lev. Jodie Foster was Jodie Foster, a name already familiar with show business by the time she was 15. She has a good knowing sense of what to do in a supporting role that has good timing in terms of humor that obviously was destined for bigger things. The rest of the cast is fairly decent, giving credence to the plot not being lazy farce by giving their best to the odd material. The songs work to the level of the film in charm and timing without coming off as gooey or off-putting. As a whole, it may be an odd one to start a film career with, but Parker and company made a solid winner with this film in terms of bizarre charm that will likely be just right for the whole family.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Next up, a film from the Czechs.