BEFORE: OK, so it's not a straight horror movie, it's more like a throwaway 90's spy comedy, I'll wager. But it probably directly riffs off of last night's film, and linking by actors is relatively easy - Gloria Stuart was also in "Wildcats" with Goldie Hawn, who was in "Foul Play" with Chevy Chase (last seen in "Modern Problems").
THE PLOT: After a freak accident, an invisible yuppie runs for his life from a treacherous CIA official while trying to cope with his new life.
AFTER: In the original 1933 film, the invisibility potion came from some weird Indian plant pigment - something that turned a dog white, but with further refinement, could be injected under the skin of a man and make him transparent. Even assuming we're not talking about bending light waves or any impossible physics, from what I know of optics and color theory, white light is not the absence of color, it's the presence of all color wavelengths. Light has additive color properties, meaning that if the Invisible Man wasn't emitting any light, he should appear as a dark void.
However, with pigments, dyes and inks, color takes on subtractive properties - meaning that the sky is blue for a different reason than, say, a car is blue. A car painted blue appears blue because it's absorbing all light wavelengths except the blue ones. And in the case of paints, crayons, etc., the properties are reversed - so white is the absence of color and black the presence of all colors - which is why a black car gets hotter in the summer, it's absorbing more light/heat.
Even with this codicil, however, it's still got to be impossible to subtract enough color to make an man invisible, right? Maybe transparent like a jellyfish, but not invisible. Tonight's junk science dispatches all this, and our main character gets bombarded with radiation from a science experiment (yes, that old bugaboo) and his molecules are "in flux". Still pretty impossible, but whatever.
It's interesting to note that special effects did improve over the years - so by 1992 they had green-screening and ultimatte down pretty well. Around that time I was working on music videos as a P.A., and my morning job on shoot days was to paint the studio walls that very particular shade of green. (or blue, if we were working with a green Muppet or something) I lost several pairs of pants to that icky green color, that you've probably seen briefly during the weather report.
There is some suspense in this film as the CIA hunts down Nick Halloway, the updated Invisible Man. Any tension comes from the black-ops team with their heat-vision goggles and their tranq darts, and the knowledge we all have regarding what the CIA is capable of. But it's pretty unclear - do they want to capture and contain him, or use him as the ultimate secret agent?
Halloway just wants to get returned to normal - and maybe spy on a hot girl getting ready for bed. (See, I told you...)
The whole thing is narrated like a classic film noir, but that's where the similarities end. When you try to make a film that's action, suspense and comedy all rolled into one, you might just get a comedy that isn't very funny, or an action film that doesn't take itself seriously enough.
NITPICK POINT: As in the classic 1933 film, the Invisible Man points out that if he eats food, you can see it in his stomach for about an hour, until it gets digested - at which point it's presumably part of him, and therefore also invisible. But any food in his mouth, throat or stomach is surrounded by invisible body parts - so wouldn't it be invisible too? The light would be bent around it, or the radiation would also affect it, right?
NITPICK POINT #2: Sometimes Halloway is wearing visible clothing, and sometimes he's wearing clothing that's also invisible. Of course, since sometimes we the audience can see the character (even though he can't see himself), we wouldn't want to look at a naked Chevy Chase for 90 minutes, but still. Was this the clothing he was wearing when he was irradiated? And if so, how does he keep finding it, if it's invisible?
Also starring Daryl Hannah (last seen in "Legal Eagles"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Bicentennial Man"), Michael McKean (last seen in "Jack"), Stephen Tobolowsky (last seen in "Mississippi Burning"), with cameos from Rosalind Chao (last seen in "Going Berserk") and Patricia Heaton (last seen in "Space Jam").
RATING: 4 out of 10 trenchcoats
SPOOK-O-METER: 0 out of 10, unless you count the rogue actions of the CIA, which should scare us all as U.S. citizens. But not in a Halloween-y kind of way.
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