Walking into the screening of SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2, I sheepishly admitted to the publicist that I had not seen the first installment, Baby Geniuses (1999), and if this were anything like The Lord of the Rings or hour three of Brideshead Revisited, I feared I would not be able to follow along. I was reassured there was nothing to be worried about. Thankfully, SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 assumes you have not seen or remembered Baby Geniuses, which starred Peter MacNicol (that guy from Ally McBeal), Kim Cattrall, and Kathleen Turner. Turner played a woman convinced that babies talk to each other the way cats or birds presumably talk to each other. She ran a secret lair founded on the utter certainty that babies have (what the Tibetans call) Universal Knowledge until their first word is spoken. Then they gradually forget it all.
SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 helpfully jettisons that formidable mythology - even though it assumes you'll divine it anyway from the conversation between the babies. My bet is the odds of that happening are slightly better than many of you having a conversation about this same movie with a real baby. Even a superbaby. What happens (as far as I could divine from filmmaking so awkward it's hard to tell at times who's talking) is that the babies live in a day-care facility, and before we can ask where their parents are and whether babies are cute when they're karate-kicking people or driving sports cars, Scott Baio shows up. He runs the day-care facility and is very stressed out being Scott Baio. That's when one of the babies begins telling his baby friends a story that all babies should know if they are to understand their grand history.
It turns out all babies have a guardian baby who flies around the world (or at least southern California) and fights crime and protects babies everywhere, and his archenemy is Jon Voight in a blond mod wig and Hitler costume. This superbaby is called the Kahuna (Leo Fitzgerald) and from what I gathered he's 3 years old when we meet him. He's also rescuing orphans from East Berlin and fighting Communists. Did I mention he's 3? In 2004, he's roughly 48, though he occupies that same 3-year-old physique. This is because his father accidentally poisoned him and gave him super powers way back when; the drawback is his body won't age and apparently he will live forever, a vampire's existence, only as a 3-year old, outliving all other babies and human life forms and saving all babies until the sun crashes into the earth.
I found this all profoundly disturbing. The Kahuna lives in an underground Baby Cave with cheap plaster carousels and a river flooded with glitter. He is deeply lonely. He can also walk on the ceiling. Not to mention, speak baby. ("I don't know why I never forgot how," he says.) After a day of fighting crime, he drives his rocket-powered Big Wheel into his pathetic underground lair and we watch the white door to the secret facility rise and fall as he passes. We watch this three times. I found this entertaining.
Entertaining, considering.
One more thing: The Kahuna owns this machine. When the superbabies enter the machine, it tells them what they're good at. It's like a quicker version of standardized testing, only even more blunt and debilitating. One child is deemed smart and one is christened strong. The girl baby is told to love people. The African-American baby is good at ... bouncing. Did I mention this movie is so profoundly wrong? First of all, these children wear no pants (and we're subjected to numerous close-ups of diapers). They possess the sacred Universal Knowledge, but what do they say? "I want to beat someone up" and "Let's get this party started," and so on. When they talk, their lips roughly match the dialogue, while their movements roughly match whatever they're doing.
Which is sort of fitting: SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 is a rough approximation of the dozen or so cheap family comedies Disney pumped out in the 1970s. Only way cheaper. Babies cannot act. They look good rolling their heads. Look Who's Talking (1989), for example. But when a baby does back flips, one reaches for the garlic and crucifix. Director Bob Clark had better luck with adolescents in A Christmas Story and retarded adolescence in Porky's. Still, there is a certain Bad Movie Night charm to this. I am regularly sent low-budget movies from local area filmmakers and most could do a better job. On the other hand, that should not be taken as a dare.
Contact Christopher Borrelli at cborrelli@theblade.com or 419-724-6117.
First Published August 27, 2004, 9:49 a.m.
