I'm kidding, of course, but this movie was really bad. However, I can't really raise much ire over it. Thinking about the film makes me sad rather than angry. Depressed rather than giddy. It's a bit of punctuation on the downfall of director Bob Clark's career. Sure, he's made some bad movies. But he's also made some great ones, like A Christmas Story or Black Christmas. The fact that his career was reduced to this (preceded by Karate Dog) is just disheartening.
This sad wreck of a film concerns the "story" of four babies (whose names I can't remember) helping Kahuna, a man in a baby's body, prevent the evil Biscane (played by Jon Voight) from using his mind control to take over the world. Yep. Stupid and predictable.
Anyways, the main baby is the only one who believes in the existence of Kahuna. See, Kahuna is a kind of urban legend among babies, a hero who rescues kids from orphanages around the world. What he's doing in a cushy daycare run by upper-middle class yuppies is never explained. Kahuna is a child, he's supposed to be five or six years-old, but it doesn't make any goddamn sense at all, because when he was a toddler, he accidentally drank some bullshit potion his scientist father created that prevented him from growing up. Except, he clearly ages somewhat between when he is first exposed to the liquid and when we see him (both in flashback and present day).
There's so much stupid it hurts. I'm not sure how I expect to explain when the movie itself can't even convincingly do it.
Ignoring all the dumb plot elements, the movie is basically an excuse to set up these terribly-staged fight scenes between Kahuna and Jon Voight's minions. In between those boring scenes we have the sassy black baby saying crap like, "You go girl" and "What kinda milk you drinkin'? It's awful. Not a single joke lands, because they're all hackneyed turds found in slightly better children's films of the early 90's.
Aside from that, there's some trite message about "finding your inner self" and the four stupid kids get their stupid super powers in a stupid climax that feels both too long and too short to be satisfying at the same stupid time. It's also devoid of any of the titular "superbabies" for the most part. Seriously, the main kid becomes Brain Baby (see, I told you it was stupid) but does absolutely nothing during the final battle. He's on screen for maybe 20 seconds. Also, doesn't the fact that the movie is subtitled "Baby Geniuses" render his superpower redundant? If they're all geniuses (which they're not, in any conceivable fashion) then how exactly is any smarter than the other three dummies?
Also, it feels like practically every line in this movie was ADRd. What is this, an Italian film from the 60s? Okay, I get that not all of the cast members can speak in complete sentences yet (I'm looking at you, Scott Baio), but why does it seem like everyone was dubbed-over?
Luckily, this was number 1 on IMDB's bottom 100 when we first decided to go through the list, (it has since been de-throned by this) so it can only get better from here, right?
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