REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (21)
By:
June 7, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
WEIRD SCIENCE | JOHN HUGHES | 1985
As a native New Yorker, John Hughes’ high-school movies were foreign films to me, teenage angst by way of the Chicago suburbs. I never went to a mall or a football game. At the Music & Art High School in Harlem, instead of navigating jocks and nerds, I faced street gangs like The Five Percenters and The Ball Busters. Afrika Bambaattaa and The Soul Sonic Force, Run-DMC, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna were my soundtrack — not Simple Minds or OMD.
Still, at 18 I was the prime age for a story about adolescent boys inventing the perfect woman, a New Wave Frankenstein’s monster synthesizing Playboy centerfolds with Einstein’s genius into a sexy, savvy brunette bombshell in aerobic spandex… as activated by a NASA-powered home desktop computer connected to a Barbie doll.
The concept is twelve kinds of wrong, but the movie doesn’t apologize — not for one cinematic second. Everything cringeworthy could have been left on the editing room floor. But instead, writer/director John Hughes and his cast doubled down on the movie’s premise. Actress/goddess Kelly LeBrock took Phoebe Cates’ Fast Times At Ridgemont High swimming pool scene and extended it into an hour and thirty-four minutes of psycho-sexual edging.
Weird Science isn’t content to be merely a modern twist on the Frankenstein story. Hughes adds superpowers, a nuclear missile, and a post-apocalyptic motorcycle sequence parodying The Road Warrior. The movie culminates with a transformative blob of talking feces. Did these bombastic additions flex phallic fantasy and machismo? You bet your blue balls they did. However, remove all the aggro and you’re left with an honest, raw story celebrating the authenticity of hormonal urgency.
Bill Paxton portrays Chet’s pig-headed misogyny with poopy aplomb. And Anthony Michael Hall’s soulful turn as a heartbroken drunk in a jazz club are sights and sounds to cherish. As our horny protagonists learn to become “men,” there is an important exchange between Hall’s Gary and the comet he’s been too shy to chase, Suzanne Snyder’s Deb:
DEB: So, I mean, what would I be compared to her?
GARY: Deb, Lisa is everything I ever wanted in a girl — before I knew what I wanted. I know that if I could do it again, I’d make her just like you. Honest.
AIDS was right around the corner, fomenting fear and chastity in every genital on Earth. The future — our present — is more like Terminator than Weird Science. But before the internet, before social media could bring out the worst in people, before Artificial Intelligence could copy anything we ever did or said, our desires were simpler. All we wanted was a non-judgmental Kelly LeBrock, who knew exactly what to do with the assignment.
REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Annie Nocenti on AFTER HOURS | Lynn Peril on BRAZIL | Mandy Keifetz on BODY DOUBLE | Carlo Rotella on ROBOCOP | Marc Weidenbaum on GROUNDHOG DAY | Erik Davis on REPO MAN | Mimi Lipson on STRANGER THAN PARADISE | Josh Glenn on HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING | Susan Roe on HOUSEKEEPING | Gordon Dahlquist on SOMETHING WILD | Heather Quinlan on EATING RAOUL | Anthony Miller on MIRACLE MILE | Karinne Keithley Syers on BETTER OFF DEAD | Adam McGovern on WALKER | Ramona Lyons on MILLER’S CROSSING | Vanessa Berry on WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? | Elina Shatkin on NIGHT OF THE COMET | Susannah Breslin on MAN BITES DOG | Tom Nealon on DELICATESSEN | Lisa Jane Persky on RUMBLE FISH | Dean Haspiel on WEIRD SCIENCE | Heather Kapplow on HEATHERS | Micah Nathan on BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA | Deborah Wassertzug on ELECTRIC DREAMS | Mark Kingwell on WITHNAIL AND I.
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