| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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INNERSPACE
Rating: 
USA. 1987.
Director – Joe Dante, Screenplay – Jeffrey Boam & Chip Proser, Story – Proser, Producer – Michael G. Finnell, Photography – Andrew Laszlo, Music – Jerry Goldsmith, Visual Effects – Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisor – Dennis Muren), Special Effects Supervisor – Michael Woods, Makeup Effects – Rob Bottin & Chris Walas, Production Design – James H. Spencer. Production Company – Amblin/Universal.
Cast:
Dennis Quaid (Lieutenant Tuck Pendleton), Martin Short (Jack Putter), Meg Ryan (Lydia Maxwell), Kevin McCarthy (Victor Scrimshaw), Fiona Lewis (Dr Margaret Canker), Vernon Wells (Igoe), John Hora (Ozzie Wexler), William Schallert (Dr Greenbush), Robert Picardo (Cowboy), Wendy Schaal (Wendy)
Plot: Test pilot Tuck Pendleton is placed in a one-man submersible and reduced to microscopic size as part of an experiment where he is to be injected into the bloodstream of a rabbit. But industrial criminals break into the laboratory and steal the controlling microchip from the miniaturizer. One of the scientists runs with the syringe containing Tuck and accidentally injects it into the buttock of neurotic supermarket clerk Jack Putter before he is shot. Tuck connects a spy camera to Jack’s optic nerve to find where he is and then uses a broadcast mike attached to Jack’s eardrum to communicate with him and get his help. With Jack initially thinking he is possessed, Tuck tries to organize him to find the crooks, get the microchip and return him to full size before his 24 hour air-supply runs out.
Joe Dante, first emerged to attention as director of Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1980), cheerfully entertaining B-budget monster movies that come packed to the gills with sly genre asides and cameos. Dante then had a big hit with the Spielberg-produced Gremlins (1984), a maliciously gleeful trashing of the same territory that Spielberg visited in E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). However Gremlins was the one high-point in Dante’s career and, although he has made much better films since– Explorers (1985), Matinee (1993), Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) and tv’s Eerie, Indiana (1991-2) – nothing else he has done has been a hit.
With Innerspace, Dante parodies the classic sf film Fantastic Voyage (1966). Everybody was expecting Innerspace to be a big hit, only it wasn’t. Unlike Dante’s Explorers, Innerspace wasn’t a worthwhile film that never really found its audience, rather it was just a chaotic comedy that never came to life. Fantastic Voyage was a film conducted with a mind-boggling sense of wonder; Innerspace by comparison uses the idea as only the basis of a screwball comedy. It’s a film whose failure revealed the limitations of Dante as a filmmaker – that his perpetual in-joking and genre in-referencing was only speaking to a very limited fan audience and that without much more than that there was little to his films. Dante maintains an energetic pace, but this only tends to reveal the plot’s implausibilties. The plot, from Jeffrey Boam who had just done a fine job on David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1983), stretches credulity at too many points. The worst of these is a convenient piece of sleight of hand about using ‘nerve stimulation’ by the miniature submarine to instantly rearrange Martin Short’s face into Robert Picardo’s.
Dennis Quaid’s cocksure playing is quite likable. (This is the film where he and Meg Ryan met and would later marry). This was also the first major starring role of Martin Short (although Short is really playing a part that should have been cast with Woody Allen). The Industrial Light and Magic special effects are expectedly good, although the only moment the film evokes the same wondrousness that Fantastic Voyage did is the momentarily beautiful image of Quaid’s sub entering Ryan’s womb and seeing their unborn child’s foetus.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999
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