weird science

Few directors have a filmography that feels quite as hallowed as the filmography of John Hughes. His high school comedies in particular - The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles - are virtually untouchable works… consecrated cinema, as it were. The one notable exception is Weird Science - the… if not quite black, then at least darker-hued sheep of Hughes’s coming-of-age oeuvre - whose “horny teen comedy with a sci-fi twist” premise has long felt ripe for a shrewder, more canny remake. Like many 80s classics, it’s cherished mostly on nostalgic principle, even though the movie’s largely indolent approach and lumpy design feel like a missed opportunity more often than not.

Shermer High students Gary and Wyatt (Hughes regular Anthony Michael Hall and 80s trivia footnote Ilan Mitchell-Smith) are dorkus maximus of nonexistent social standing, who decide one evening to program the perfect woman on Wyatt’s computer (there’s no particular narrative catalyst… Gary simply stumbles across an old Frankenstein film within the first five minutes and off we go). Their ambitions are relatively modest at first (Gary plans to ask the simulation all manner of sex-related queries; Wyatt figures they can play chess with her)… but once they begin feeding Playboy pics into the scanner (the bit where Wyatt expands potential breast size beyond the parameters of the monitor is definitely an uproarious gag when you’re eight years old), they decide to hack into a government computer system and the resulting power surge literally brings their creation to life… in the form of the statuesque Kelly LeBrock. 

This is a fabulous setup with a myriad of narrative possibilities, but Hughes mainly opts for raunchy farce (“So… what would you little maniacs like to do first?” LeBrock’s character - who’s eventually dubbed “Lisa” - asks… cut to the three of them showering together). The fundamental issue baked into the premise is that Lisa - who decides to throw a party-for-the-ages at Wyatt’s house while his parents are away for the weekend - is a literal deus ex machina, capable of solving each and every problem with a snap of her fingers. Wyatt’s uptight grandparents show up unexpectedly and threaten to spoil the fun? Lisa temporarily freezes them and stashes their bodies in the pantry. Lisa is forced to pull a gun because Gary’s conservative parents refuse to let him leave the house? She just wipes their memories five minutes later. Wyatt’s military dipstick of an older brother Chet (Bill Paxton) is being a nuisance? Lisa transforms him into some sort of mutant blob (don’t ask). The house is completely trashed and there happens to be a medium-range ballistic missile jutting through the kitchen floor? It all simply reverts back to normal thirty seconds before Wyatt’s parents return. It's difficult to achieve drama (even in comedic form) when the stakes are purely illusory.

The point of the story is obviously Lisa endeavoring to give Gary and Wyatt the self-confidence to reach their full potential… but there’s a certain artificiality to it. Lisa conjuring a cartoonish, Mad Max-style motorcycle gang to show up and make trouble is a contrived impetus for character growth, to say the least. LeBrock is frequently cited as the best thing about the movie, though her bewitching British wiles mostly mask the fact that Lisa isn’t much more three-dimensional than she was when she existed as computer code (it’s a potentially demeaning role that LeBrock, to her credit, never allows to actually become demeaning; she remains resolutely in control throughout). Hall is excellent, as usual; he was arguably more of a muse to Hughes in the 80s than even Molly Ringwald. Mitchell-Smith, however, can barely wipe the smirk off his face half the time… he’s like an SNL cast member who can’t get through a single sketch without breaking.​

This perhaps conveys a somewhat grim impression of the film as dated and more than a little cringe-worthy… but even though it’s almost certainly the least sincere movie Hughes ever made, it still possesses a loose, off-the-cuff sense of fun appropriate to its era. It provides nostalgic comfort calories. One might wish that the story packed a little more “weird” into the Weird Science, but there is one terrific sequence in which Gary and Wyatt attempt to recreate their experiment for a couple of loutish classmates (Robert Rusler and Robert Downey Jr, back in his early days, when he looked like a Robert Smith clone), causing the party’s entire fabric of reality to unravel into trippy mayhem. If only the entire movie were powered by that same anarchic spark. Still, Hughes had a secret weapon up his sleeve - Oingo Boingo’s title song, which still absolutely slays decades later. Once it kicks in over the opening credits, it feels like 1985 all over again. And you can’t really place a cinematic value on that.