The Classics According to Keith - Weird Science
EVERY TIME I DIE frontman KEITH BUCKLEY waxes cinematic on the more important films of our time—sort of.
WEIRD SCIENCE (UNIVERSAL, 1985)
STARS: Kelly LeBrock, Anthony Michael Hall, Ilan Mitchell-Smith, Bill Paxton, Robert Downey Jr.
THE PLOT: This movie is everything that was right with the 1980s. Teens were innocuously horny, home computers were the gateway into complex, uncharted alternate dimensions, and women were sex slaves. If you haven’t seen this movie, chances are that as a teenager you made the amateur mistake of paying for sex when you could have simply fed Playboy photographs into a nondescript box with blinking lights and allowed your Commodore VIC-20 to compile random favorable attributes and give life to a submissive British goddess. Sucker. Unlike me, Gary (Hall) and Wyatt (Mitchell-Smith) can’t get laid to save their lives. Adding insult to injury are Ian (Downey) and Wyatt’s brother Chet (Paxton), whose constant harassment make the nerdy duo’s life a living hell. That is until Lisa (LeBrock) is invented. Knowing nothing but a carnal desire to satisfy her creators, Lisa’s accent and breasts make Gary and Wyatt the coolest guys in school. But will the creepy dude from Midnight Oil expose them for the born losers they are? Will the dude who plays Wyatt ever be in another movie? Only science will tell.
THE POINT: What writer/director John Hughes has masterfully conveyed in this foreboding science fiction satire is that man’s reliance on technology will inevitably be the bane of its existence. Even in their most archaic form, computers possess the advanced capability to lull mankind into believing that Kelly LeBrock would’ve remained a sultry and voluptuous vixen whose natural beauty would stand the test of time. Fast-forward 20 years to VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club 3 and the indictment made by Hughes on the fallacious nature of technology rears its ugly head. And my genitalia wept… ALT
