Starring Jay Underwood (The Boy Who Could Fly, Not Quite Human), Chynna Phillips (the “Phillips” in Wilson Phillips) and Karen Black, The Invisible Kid is something you have to see to believe.
For the uninitiated: A dorky kid concocts a homemade invisibility cocktail – because 80s nerds were always up to science shenanigans between swirlies – and uses it to sneak into locker rooms, dodge bullies, mess with his principal, and try to impress girls. There’s also a basketball subplot in there somewhere.
Probably pitched as Weird Science meets Revenge of the Nerds, or something that might have hung out with Teen Wolf, it ended up sharing the bottom shelf with other peeping toms like Zapped or School Spirit.
And even with its PG rating, you get quite an eye full.
This definitely feels like someone’s idea of someone’s idea of what teens would be into at the time. The script could easily have been written from a checklist of the more popular movie beats of the previous several years. Which is probably why if felt relatively outdated in 1988, by this point in teen comedy history, things had taken a sharp Hughesian turn, and feel-good coming of age date flicks with Cusack, Dempsey and the Coreys were the hotness du jour. The old teen sex comedies were getting stashed away in big brother’s sock drawer.
The Invisible Kid is a time capsule packed with smaller time capsules – each setup, each joke, each character trope was already past its sell-by date by the time it hit the shelves. But that’s what makes it weirdly compelling. It’s not a great movie, maybe not even a good one – but it’s a snapshot of a genre that was quickly vanishing. -Pop
The Invisible Kid (1988) appeared on Home Video this week in 1988, after a March 30th theatrical disappearing act.