| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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THE INVISIBLE KID
Rating: 
USA. 1987.
Director/Screenplay – Avery Crounse, Producer – Philip J. Spinelli, Photography – Michael Barnard, Music – Steve Hunter & Jan King, Visual Effects – Ernie Farino, Special Effects – Lou Carlucci, Makeup Design – Annie Maniscalco, Art Direction – Charles Tomlinson. Production Company – Elysian Pictures.
Cast:
Jay Underwood (Grover Dunn), Chynna Phillips (Cindy Moore), Nicholas de Toth (Donny Zanders), Wally Ward (Milton McClane), Karen Black (Devora Dunn), John Madden Towey (Principal Baxter), Mike Genovese (Sergeant Chuck Malone)
Plot: Teenager Grover Dunn succeeds in replicating his late father’s experiments and creates a powder that makes the taker invisible for 30 minutes at a time. He and his best friend have fun humiliating a basketball jock and spying in the girl’s locker room. But then the officious Principal Baxter determines to obtain the formula for himself. Hunted by the police, and with the formula lasting less each time he uses it, Grover must save the day by invisibly aiding the school basketball team to win the game that Baxter has promised to rig for his Mafia friends.
As might be predicted from the title, The Invisible Kid is an attempt to play The Invisible Man (1933) as a teen comedy. H.G. Wells’s original story was a brilliant study in both the practical and psychological effects invisibility might present. On the other hand The Invisible Kid uses invisibility for nothing other than a novelty teen makeout comedy. The film deals with possibly the most remarkable scientific discovery of the century but the immediate ends it puts the discovery to is to dump popcorn on the macho jock’s head and to plant a hot dog in his lap in a position resembling an erect member. There is of course the inevitable invisible man in a girl’s locker room fantasy.
This is really no more than a teen comedy like Meatballs (1979) or Porky’s (1982) with an invisibility gimmick. There are some appallingly slapstick sequences involving a car chase sequence with invisible drivers and vehicles heading through car washes, and an extraordinarily silly climax which involves most of the cast in animal suits running in and out of a store room. Karen Black, who other than Jay Underwood, is the only recognizable name in the cast, gives an amazingly empty-headed performance as Underwood’s tv talkshow addicted mother.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1996
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