Anyhow, Innerspace is a loose re-working of 1966 sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage, in that they both deal with a miniaturized, manned craft being injected into somebody's body. In the case of Innerspace, this involves alcoholic former test pilot Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quaid), who is meant to be exploring the insides of a white lab rabbit but lands up inside neurotic grocery store clerk Jack Putter (Martin Short) instead after criminals make an attempt to steal the miniaturisation technology. Putter, already a paranoid hypochondriac, rapidly finds out that everybody now really is out to get him.
When I was a kid, this formed the second part of a regular afternoon's video viewing - the first part would always be Biggles, Adventures in Time. They were funny, they were exciting, and if they both contained scary bits I soon learned where they were and knew exactly when to look away and turn back again.
The good
I have to admit, when I thought about returning to this one it was with the default assumption that it would be absolutely dire. Biggles was mildly awful, after all, but at least it had the virtue of being a proper curio, where as this had Spielberg's name slapped over the opening credits and thus by definition, had to be mass-market, overly-sentimental tosh.On the whole, I was pleasantly surprised.
They made movies weirder 30 years ago, I suspect, because Innerspace strikes me as rather more fearless than a lot of modern family fare. Of course, that could down to director Joe Dante, who I suspect has never been entirely happy in the mainstream. True, he's a Spielberg protegé, but I've always had the sense that he was straining at the leash to produce something a little nastier and more twisted; I'd have loved to have seen him fulfil his potential and become the horror genre's very own John Waters figure.
As it is, though, we have this one, a fun sci-fi caper with smart performances from some of the era's leading stars. Quaid, we are led to believe, is largely playing himself, something he pulls off with aplomb, while SNL regular Martin Short turns Putter into a surprisingly engaging figure - by the end, we're really rooting for him. The scripting is smart enough - just - to hold the attention, and the effects work is right on the mark; the miniaturisation sequence in particular is paced well enough as to create a genuine sense of wonder and excitement, and that doesn't happen to a cynic like me very often.
Full marks, too, for the character of Lydia (Meg Ryan), Pendleton's brave, proactive girlfriend who's more than capable of rescuing herself from any scrapes she gets into.
One final note: the rubber mask transformation scenes are apparently very highly-rated among, err, rubber mask transformation aficionados. I think aficionados is the word? Nope, my bad, it's fetishists. Still, point still stands.
The bad
It's a Joe Dante film, which means that practically by definition, it's a movie in search of a target audience. I was too young and too timid for Gremlins when it came out (and I still haven't got round to it) but kiddie horror is a tricky genre to pull off, and my general impression was that he only partially succeeded. I have, on the other hand, seen Small Soldiers, which felt a little like a remake; it charmed the pants off me, but parts of it still sort of scared the socks off me, too.Make no mistake, Dante has a talent for nastiness - no bad thing if you're aiming for a family market, but you have to be able to judge it right. More to the point, I'm not quite sure what interest younger audiences would have in Pendleton's alcoholism, nor what older ones might have in Putter's terrified slapstick.
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