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.
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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