REAL GENIUS (1985)

After Val Kilmer’s recent death, it was both touching and surprising to see how many people on social media singled out his first two films as special favorites, this rude college comedy and his spy spoof debut in TOP SECRET!/’84, wacky comedy not being the first thing that comes to mind on Kilmer.  But where TOP SECRET!, while uneven as any from those AIRPLANE!/’80 guys (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker) probably looks better now than it did on release (good fun at its worst/fall on the floor hilarious at its best), REAL GENIUS looks DOA in every department.  Basically, it’s ANIMAL HOUSE meets YOUNG SHELDON as college senior Kilmer mentors 14-yr-old genius Gabriel Jarret at the lab and in the dorm, tasked by professor William Atherton to finish a Pentagon laser-from-space war weapon.  Hormones vs. hardware; and it’s tough to know what comes off worse: dialogue; characterizations & acting (Jarret & girlfriend Patti D'Arbanville wouldn’t make it on SAVED BY THE BELL); director Martha Coolidge’s lack of comic chops, the cheap/unfunny production design, or the hideous lensing.*  And Kilmer?  Working too hard to be the cool guy, the life of the campus party, the irreverent class clown with a sackful of funny faces, comic tumbles and goofy leaps of joie de vivre.  (He’s much the same, to equally bad effect, in WILLOW/’88.)  One of the Zucker brothers is quoted as saying he tried, but failed to get Kilmer to loosen up and be silly on SECRET!, when Kilmer just wanted to bring some realism to his ridiculous character; which of course made his work there all the funnier.  But then, Coolidge seems to have given everyone, cast and crew, the same bad advice: 'be funny.'*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *My advice?  Stick to TOP SECRET!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/top-secret-1984.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Hard to believe that cinematographer is the great Vilmos Zsigmond.  The last time he’d been so out of touch with his material, he manned up, accepted defeat, and ankled the project (FUNNY LADY/’75), admitting he simply didn’t know how to light the huge interior sets.  To the rescue?  James Wong Howe, coming out of retirement to shoot one last project.