Not Quite Human

Steven Hilliard Stern, 1987
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 36%

As this was a TV movie, Rotten Tomatoes gives me only an audience rating. I don't know what kind of grouches gave it such a low rating, but they were clearly never children.

Frankly, I wonder how many people even remember this. I saw it on VHS in the early 90s, then promptly forgot about it for 20 years until someone uploaded it to YouTube. Now anyone can enjoy the antics of Alan Thicke, Bug from Uncle Buck, and Teen Witch, united together in one star-studded blockbuster.

If you ever wondered what the dad from Growing Pains would have been like if he were a genius inventor, but otherwise had exactly the same bland, generic personality, this movie has your answer. His name is Dr. Jonas Carson, and he has finally completed his life's work: Chip, a walking, talking teenage android with perfect artificial intelligence (Jay Underwood). Chip is a cheerful and gregarious robot, but he's not quite human—he is oblivious to subtlety and idiomatic speech. For some reason a lot of androids seem to have that problem in the movies.

Carson's daughter Becky (Robin Lively) thinks her robo-brother is cool, but she is frustrated by his intrusion into her social life. For no conceivable reason, Carson decides that the world must believe that Chip is a real boy, so the family packs up and moves to a new town, where Carson gets a job as a science teacher. Little does he realize, his former employer Vogel (a misanthropic war buff and toy manufacturer who hates the Carsons) wants to kidnap Chip and sell his designs to the Russians, or something.

(All this sounds like the kind of story a 10-year-old kid would make up for a comic book drawn on loose-leaf paper, where every plot element is just whatever first comes to mind. What could a scientist do for a day job? Be a science teacher! Who would want to steal an android? A guy who makes army toys! What reason could they have for keeping the robot a secret? Who cares?)

The storyline about Vogel and his henchman trying to kidnap Chip is put on the back burner while Chip and Becky struggle to get along in their new school. All the other high school characters function purely as plot devices, with few coherent personality traits. Sasha Mitchell from Step by Step plays a dream-hunk who haphazardly vacillates between affection and indifference toward Becky. Chip (programmed to protect humans) rescues a dweeby guy from a bully, but the dweeb immediately turns his back on Chip as soon as the plot calls for an interpersonal conflict. The best-realized secondary character is Erin, a girl who is charmed by Chip's robotic quirkiness and inability to understand slang.

When the crooks finally show up to steal Chip, the plot clumsily switches gears while Becky and Carson try to rescue him. The bad guys need a secret password to reprogram Chip, so they trap Becky and her dad in a junkyard and threaten to activate Chip's self-destruct mechanism unless Carson discloses it. The password turns out to be "CARSON" (I guess "PASSWORD1" was too many characters), but Chip cleverly escapes reprogramming by trapping one of the villains in a box.

But Chip has only moments to act, because the van imprisoning Carson and Becky has been thrown into a car-crusher at the junkyard! Keep in mind, the criminals did not put the van in the crusher; some junkyard employee just so happened to wander along and decide to crush this particular van at this exact moment. Anyway, Chip saves the day, and the family is free to go about their unnecessary ruse of passing off an android as a high school student.

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I was surprised to learn that Not Quite Human was originally a book series by Seth McEvoy. There were six books, all published between 1985 and 1986. I thought only Goosebump books could be speed-written at that rate.

This was followed by two sequels: Not Quite Human II, in which Chip goes to college and meets a female not-quite-human; and Still Not Quite Human, featuring a robotic Alan Thicke. (There's a joke to be made here at Alan Thicke's expense, but I'm going to take the high road. The man wrote the Diff'rent Strokes theme song; let's show some respect.)

Overall, you get no less and no more than you expect from a made-for-TV family comedy. Jay Underwood does an excellent job of portraying what you intuitively expect a teenage robot to act like, and I'm sure today's kids would find him amusing.

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Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

Joe Johnston, 1989
Rotten Tomatoes score: 75%

Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) has just perfected the world's most astonishing invention: A laser beam that destroys apples. Little does anyone expect, all it takes is an errant baseball to convert this industrial marvel into a shrinking ray.

As Szalinski explains to his skeptical corporate benefactors, all atoms are mostly empty space. His device uses magic to reduce that empty space, shrinking objects to minuscule size. Now, you might think that this would increase the density of matter to that of a neutron star, so that a quarter-inch-tall teenager would still weigh over 100 pounds, but that just shows how little you understand about science.

The Szalinskis seem to be having some sort of thinly established family problems due to Wayne's obsessive habits. His wife Diane is fed up with him, and his kids, Amy and Nick, are stuck managing the household on the weekends. Meanwhile, their next-door neighbors, the Thompsons have their own irrelevant problems. Big Russ Thompson can't relate to his elder son, Russ Junior, who has no interest in sports or fly-fishing.

When young Ron Thompson hits a grand-slam through the Szalinskis' attic window, Russ Junior drags him over to apologize to Nick and Amy and to offer to pay for the repairs. Ron insists on retrieving his baseball, so all four kids ascend to the attic just in time to get accidentally zapped by the shrinking ray. Moments later, Wayne Szalinski returns home from a meeting, frustrated by the cool reception his project has received. He expresses his annoyance by aggressively sweeping window fragments (and, unwittingly, the shrunken children) off the attic floor and into a lawn bag. (This scene makes no sense, but it was necessary to put the kids in a garbage bag so as to move them into the yard, where they can encounter more cinematic hazards.)

It takes Szalinski half the movie to realize he has shrunk the kids, whereupon he embarks on a series of spectacularly futile attempts to find them in the yard. He doesn't want to step on them, so he chooses to stumble around the yard on stilts looking at the grass through a magnifying lens. When this fails, he creates a preposterous contraption to suspend him a foot above the ground, using the television as a counterweight.

Meanwhile, the kids have their microscopic hands full. Amy falls into a trickle of water from a sprinkler, and Russ has to use movie first aid to resuscitate her. Nick gets picked up by a bee and has an allergic reaction to pollen, even though the pollen grains are visibly much too large to fit into his nose. They encounter an ant, which immediately kills them all and takes them back to its nest to be fed to larvae. No, actually the ant allows them to ride on its back. Then it protects them from a scorpion, nobly sacrificing its ant life in the process.

(A scorpion? Where is this movie taking place? Why wasn't it a spider?)

Eventually, the writers realized it was taking too long to get the kids into the house, so the Szalinskis' dog Quark arrives as a canis ex machina to carry them indoors. They make it to the breakfast table, where Nick falls into Wayne's bowl of Cheerios, and Wayne notices him in the nick of time. (I saw the trailer for this movie on TV when I was four years old, and this scene scared the bejesus out of me. I was certain that little bastard was going to get eaten.) Anyway, once Wayne discovers the kids, it doesn't take long for him to return them to normal size.

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This was a good kids' movie. We kids loved it at the time, and it still holds up for me. It's funny to see movies from the late 80s and early 90s that still use old-fashioned special effects, realizing that five years later they would be long gone from the movies. They look pretty good, particularly in the ant vs. scorpion sequence.

There were two sequels to this. The first was Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, which deserves the prize for the most misleading title in movie history. (For those not in the know, no child explodes in the movie; he just gets bigger. We were all disappointed.) Later, there was a made-for-TV sequel, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, where the adults are the shrunken ones. I may get around to these some day.

Oh, one other thing. This movie was filmed in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Vancouver, and Mexico City. Considering that nearly every scene takes place either in the house or on a special-effects sound stage, this multiplicity of locations puzzles me.

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