Journey to Time

“You’re an overly dramatic creep and totally scary.”

The older kid was not impressed by Dennis Quaid’s arrogant pilot character, Tuck, as he makes a drunken scene at a formal event in the beginning of 1987’s Innerspace.

I’d been looking for an eighties comedy to show them. Not sure why. There was a certain duty to be upheld with my movie-night picks. I wasn’t going to pick one of theirs, no Disney (at least not modern Disney), no Pixar, no Trolls. Those movies were great. I enjoyed them, but those were the kids’ picks. I had to give them something different, something that I really hoped wouldn’t suck.

I turned to the eighties with some degree of confidence that there was good stuff there. We’d had some success with Back to the Future (1985) but had struck out with everything else, including E.T. (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), and The Goonies (1985), which were all too scary and had to be turned off, basically within the first few scenes. I didn’t want to give up on the era. I didn’t realize then that what I wanted from the era wasn’t to be found in the very top-grossing films.

I was thinking about what had worked for me when I was their age, but using myself as a model was a terrible idea. I had from an early age what I gradually came to realize was an abnormally intense relationship with films, particularly films I should have never been allowed to see. Some of it was the times, for sure. In third grade a kid’s mother took a group of us to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Some of it was the age gap between me and my younger sisters. They took up the bulk of the parenting while I was upstairs watching HBO which had recently come into the house. Some of it was the parenting itself. My father regularly took me to movies that either he knew nothing about, that he himself wanted to see, or that he for some reason thought were age appropriate.

Through a combination of these modes, by the time I was 10, the age of my older kid, I had seen movies like Dressed to Kill (1980), Excalibur (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Beastmaster (1982), and even thanks to HBO a film called Equus (1977), which I was pretty sure no one of any age was supposed to see, ever. These were on top of watching Donald Sutherland smash that alien humanoid’s head in with a shovel in the greenhouse. That scene stuck with me.

My older kid was a different kid, and I was a different parent. I valued my early film education. It wasn’t all sex and gore, either. I also got to see films such as A Hard Day’s Night (1964), King Kong (1933), and The Four Feathers (1939), which all had profound impact.

But I wasn’t going to show my kids any of that, under any circumstances, and not because I wouldn’t want to scar them or impact them in the same way. I wasn’t scarred, and the impact was super valuable. It was because they simply would not stand for it. They wouldn’t watch. They’d leave the room, or the theater, or otherwise make any attempted screening futile. They were different kids. I knew better.

“I’m a fourth grader, dad. I’m fine with bad words and cigarettes.”

The older kid said to assure me that the adult aspects of the film wouldn’t bother him. He’d come a long way. Those two things had been exactly what had bothered him about Grease (1978) only a year or so earlier.

I had always thought that the plot of Fantastic Voyage (1966) was cool and interesting. A spaceship shrunken down and travelling through a human body. But that movie was boring. Not even Raquel Welch could save it. I knew the kids would dig the plot, but not the movie. If only there were a movie that updated the concept and hit it with some big-screen glitz.

I had only seen Innerspace once, in the theater at age 15. I remembered it as enjoyable but forgettable, a really cool plot idea that somehow left me wanting for what they might have done with it. So much time had passed, though, that I didn’t have total confidence in my assessment. Turned out my 15-year-old critical skills were spot on!

I knew the movie would contain elements I hadn’t recalled. Common Sense Media indicated that the scenes to watch out for were of Dennis Quaid’s bare ass and some foul language. They gave it an age rating of 11+. I figured there’d be other inappropriate stuff in there, but I wasn’t going to pre-screen it, and I was keying in on the plot. I gave it my best pitch, and they were intrigued by the ship-inside-a-human-body angle.

After the opening scenes, which in addition to a drunken Tuck, feature a stunning Meg Ryan, at her absolute eighties best in a black mini-dress, and the aforementioned shot of Quaid’s naked backside, Tuck accepts an experimental miniaturization mission to be injected into a rabbit. He doesn’t have a lot of choice. During the experiment, the bad guys bust in, Die Hard-style (1988). (I know it came after, but what else so perfectly captures that eighties trope of well-dressed and well-organized baddies?)

The lead scientist makes a break for it, into a nearby mall, holding the syringe with Tuck inside, and just before he’s killed (in a somewhat intense scene), he injects Tuck into unsuspecting bystander Jack, played by Martin Short.

Hilarity ensues.

Tuck, thinking he’s in the rabbit, pilots around until he can latch onto an optic nerve and get a view. We see the first effects sequences inside the body.

“It’s not realistic. I told you it wouldn’t be realistic.”

The older kid is confident in his knowledge of the human body. The younger feels like he knows about as much, too.

Tuck hooks into Jack’s ear as well and starts communicating with him. The nervous, hypochondriac grocery-store clerk played by Short believes he’s going insane. He responds out loud to the voice only he can hear, while he’s in a doctor’s waiting room.

At moments like that the producers’ and director’s thought process seems to reveal itself. Let’s put Quaid’s voice inside Short’s head and just have him react to it. The rest writes itself. Comedy gold.

“What’s going on? What is wrong with that man?”

The younger got confused by the plot, or maybe just confused in general by watching Short in action.

“Scientifically Inaccurate!”

The older remained indignant.

Things pick up as the two characters begin to work together to solve their common dilemma. Jack goes to Tuck’s apartment, and after establishing the basics of what’s going on, is convinced by Tuck to have a drink to relax. Tuck has one along with him from his handy flask. Jack then does a ridiculous dance to Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away,” hopping onto furniture, doing his Ed Grimley-style twist, hands up, knees swinging.

It’s good for a few chuckles. Jack then collapses onto the couch with a buzz on and ponders the “gastric mucosa” and “intestinal villi” that he’ll never get to see, as if they’re far-off destinations. Those lines made me laugh, the way Short delivers them with his pseudo-stupid, dazed style, the same one that was good for many laughs on SNL.

Tuck realizes he doesn’t know what the face looks like of the host body he’s in, so he tells Jack to go to the bedroom mirror. The mirror is where Short is at his best, slapping himself into sobriety, to rise to the challenge! He smacks himself in the face. The younger laughs. Tuck’s ship shakes.

“Harder!” Tuck yells.

Short slaps himself out of the frame and onto the floor. The younger cracks up. The gift of physical comedy shines. It cannot be denied. Martin Short slapping himself in a mirror, Peter Sellers falling backwards off a veranda roof, Moe Howard swinging at Larry Fine, missing and catching a two-by-four to the noggin. These are scenes that transcend the years and the ages. Plenty other stuff is plenty funny, Keaton, Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, comedies of wits, manners, situational, dark comedy, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, on and on.

But one, my kids weren’t going to stand for, let alone laugh at, any of that.

And two, like The Simpsons once put it, those other movies have a lot going for them, but Football to the Groin has a football to the groin. We have a clear winner.

The laughs slow down after that. There are a few funny moments in the wild special-effects scenes that have Jack’s face morphing and contorting as his nerves are “programmed” by Tuck. The special effects are quite good, cutting-edge camera and editing wizardry for the time, which the kids just read as “old” for their stark difference from current digital effects. With eighties movies, I feel like I can see the technology at work, even though I don’t understand how it’s done any more so than I do with CGI. It looks like it was at least done with cameras, something mechanical is in play, as opposed to the completely frictionless experience of watching modern effects-driven films.

Then there is the horrific death scene of the villain henchman Mr. Igoe, who had been miniaturized and injected into Jack to kill the miniature Tuck. Unfortunately for Igoe, Tuck had positioned his ship in the esophagus, so when Igoe comes in, sort-of Moonraker-style, in a jetpack, Tuck is able to send him into the gurgling green acid of the stomach below. Flesh digested, his skeletal remains then pass across Tuck’s window, and our screens.

We all exclaimed and winced at the sight, which as per eighties movies, was the intended effect. If the movie were any kind of part-action or part-thriller, it had to contain at least one ghastly death scene. Even a sci-fi-comedy-action movie, maybe especially one of those.

After more shrinking-technology hijinks and switcheroos, Tuck is finally re-embiggened and reunited with Meg Ryan’s Lydia, who of course had had a brief flirtation with Jack, enough for a couple of kisses to further the plot, but who ultimately must marry the cocky, handsome pilot Tuck. As they ride off from the wedding, Jack notices they’re in trouble and, newly confident, rushes off to save them.

The kids were glad when it ended.

It was an interesting pick, not a bad film at all, and very representative of the eighties. It won’t become a family favorite. It’s not that kind of movie. What had I hoped for the pick to accomplish? To demonstrate that older movies could be good, entertaining, even compelling? Maybe that had been accomplished, but that was a pretty low bar.

To open up more mature themes? Curse words? Different blends of genre? Funny old physical comedians? To get us to the eighties in general just to give myself more old picks to work with? To see Meg Ryan in her prime running around in a black cocktail dress?

Any of those was a worthwhile goal, and it could be argued that Innerspace does a decent job with all of them. Of course many better examples could be presented toward any of those goals as well.

The problem with trying to find an eighties movie that the kids would like was the problem of trying to graft an entire sensibility onto a completely different era. Eighties movies are problematic in all kinds of ways, but the biggest way had to do with the moment in which we originally encountered them. Eighties movies could be offensive, mature, sexist, misogynist, explicit, racist, shocking, or just weird and off-putting. We had to process these jarring moments in films that were otherwise not filled with such moments and were often marketed directly to us as age-appropriate content. We’d see questionable stuff and just keep moving. Our worldview, particularly our view of adult society, expanded a little and was slightly warped along the way. That was the eighties. That was eighties movies. Kids today will not accept that level of questionable content when the film so clearly is not marketed to them, but rather was marketed to their parents. That their parents might have been their age at the time matters not. It’s the sensibility that the film is being marketed to. They read such packaging intuitively and know that it’s not for them.

We love eighties movies, or the movies of whatever era we came up in, not just because they remind us of being young, but because they in fact played an integral part in how our understanding of the world unfolded. Moments of strangeness in movies stick with us, even if we remember the film as light-hearted or funny. Parents remark on how they had forgotten the offensive parts of eighties movies when they re-watch them with their kids. But what we also forget is that what we loved about the movie is often tied to how we understood the world at the time and how the movie altered that view.

Kids today already understand the world differently. The same moments can’t impact them in the same way. They’ll have their own movies that do that, with strange, forbidden scenes that spin the clock for them toward the wide, grown-up world.

Of course all of these movies could be appreciated in different ways and at different ages. Maybe one day the kids and I can watch an old movie of theirs and I can try to appreciate it as being formative to them. Then we can watch one of mine, and I can finally show them Raging Bull. Or maybe we’ll re-watch one that I tried to show them when they were little, and we can look at it through that lens. Maybe we’ll even re-watch Innerspace and see it in a whole new light.

Well, maybe not that one.