WEIRD SCIENCE

If you want be a party animal, you have to learn to live in the jungle.

John Hughes completely corrupted my tastes. I grew up on a steady diet of his pop culture—including everything influenced by his pop culture—just like a new generation's growing up on Judd Apatow movies.

I could have sworn I'd previously written an entry on the seminal Weird Science, but I can't seem to find it.

It's your basic suburban-teenage-male sex-fantasy. Unapologetically male. Unapologetically fantasy. (The "science" in the movie is just recklessly nuts.)

And yes, I privately worshiped this movie.
I recently revisited it via the wonders of HD cable. No, it doesn't quite stand up as well as Ferris Bueller or even Sixteen Candles. But I refuse to dismiss it as a "product of its time" or my firm affection for it as a byproduct of childhood nostalgia. That's reductive and avoids any attempt to look at what was there to try to figure out what I responded to...

Weird Science is about loneliness. Sexual frustration. Women as objects of both desire and fear.

These two socially awkward boys build this fantasy woman, and—rather than a Frankenstein monster (which the film initially suggests)—she turns out to be a sort of Mary Poppins Sex Goddess. It really is like a Mary Poppins story. She appears by magic, bolsters them with magical life lessons, then disappears with the wind.

She has them throw a big party. Everyone's invited but the two boys are so socially awkward that they end up hiding in the upstairs bathroom together through most of it. As crazy as the movie is, this character detail is nicely observed. It's a small touch but it's very real. I know that as much as I fight social awkwardness in my adult life, I can still end up hiding in the bathroom if I'm at a party where I don't know anyone.

Anthony Michael Hall was sort of the Shia LeBeouf of his time—the charismatic geek. And Ilan Mitchell-Smith... well, he was just a genuine geek...

Kelly LeBrock, suffice it to say, was just disgustingly hot. A virtual parody of hotness.

It has some intellectually fascinating ideas but no, it's not a great movie. Though it's sort of a perfect pop confection. I'd shy away from trying to remake it—if only to avoid the stigma of a remake—but I wouldn't mind writing something inspired by it. There's a gleeful absurdity to that movie that I think Hughes managed to pull off coz he wrote and directed it. People were a lot more forgiving in the 80s.

It's worth noting that Hughes recycled the geeks-save-the-party- from-the-scary-Mad-Max-bikers plot maneuver in his script for Some Kind of Wonderful, which itself was a sort of remake of his own Pretty in Pink.