MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN
Invisible man, visible vomit!

  There are no John Carpenter movies I actually dislike, but Memoirs Of An Invisible Man scrapes the bottom of his barrel, for sure.  The casting of Chevy Chase is almost always a sign of desperation, even back when the guy's movies made money.  1992 was well past those times, and yet everything else points to a desperate bid for a commercial hit for Carpenter.  A plot that plays like The Invisible Fugitive, lots of (attempted) physical humor, and God help us it's rated PG (the only other Carp movie that was PG was also the last box-office hit he had at the time, Starman).  This isn't all bad, there's actually quite a bit to like here, but overall, it's not very good and I would never have guessed in a million years that this was directed by Carpenter.

Chase stars as Nick Halloway, a fast-n-loose corporate type who falls asleep at the office on the very night he indirectly causes a massive computer malfunction (ah, the ol' spilled-cup-of-coffee-destroys-the-supercomputer bit) which renders large sections of the building he's in invisible.  He happens to be in one of those sections, so he and everything he's wearing turns invisible, and he can't turn it back.  So he tries to adjust to his life of newfound transparency, even managing to romance a pretty girl named Alice (Daryl Hannah), all while dodging pursuit by zealous government agent Jenkins (Sam Neill).

This was based on the novel of the same title by H.F. Saint, which I've never read, so I don't know if the novel contains that many of this movie's merits and flaws, but lemme tell you, I'm not in the least bit curious.  The best things about this movie are its effects and Neill's performance, and you won't find either one in any book.

Neill has a lot of fun in his role, displaying a lot of snaky charm and wiles (my favorite being when he uses a yawn to trick Nick into giving himself away).  But Hannah is just there to look pretty and give Nick somebody other than us to talk to.  You'd think that Michael McKean as Nick's friend would be very funny, but he's not really given a very funny role; instead, it's Gregory Paul Martin as an English windbag (ah, the ol' English windbag) who is actually quite funny.

One of the biggest problems has to be Chase himself.  I dunno guys, maybe some of you are bigger fans of his than I am, but the guy just annoys the shit out of me.  He actually manages to be bumbling and smug at the same time, which might be hilarious if he ever bothered to make it funny (the only time I found it really funny was on Politically Incorrect where he revealed that he's really like that, and a pompous, hypocritical twit to boot).

Okay, he gets one good line, where he states that he didn't see anything naughty of Hannah because he had his hands over his eyes; but then Hannah is handed the task by the three screenwriters to destroy that line by explaining just what makes it funny.  Aargh!  But, to the script's credit, there is one excellent scene about halfway through where Nick sits in on his "friends" as they talk about him freely.  Too bad it's blown off at the knees by how it's resolved, with Nick spilling drinks on people and pulling their pants down.

One of the conceits of this film is that while Nick can never see himself (and no one else can either), Carpenter lets us see him in many shots.  Maybe with a better physical comedian scenes of Nick trying to eat or put on his jacket would have worked (imagine Jim Carrey in this role!), and we'd actually WANT to see him.  Not Chase; he's just a lot more entertaining when we can't see him.

So, the comedy usually doesn't work, and unfortunately, neither do the thriller aspects, something you'd expect a director of Carpenter's history to do much better.  There just isn't a lot of excitement here, and the plot keeps tripping over itself with little bits of nonsense.  That his suit would inevitably attract very visible dust and dirt is easy to overlook.  But it's hard to take Nick seriously as someone who doesn't want to be caught when he jogs on a public beach wearing shorts with all his invisible parts "showing".  Similarly, it's hard to take the villains seriously as people who want to catch Nick when the people stationed outside his apartment are given infrared goggles, but the people actually going inside aren't.  (and ladies, if you were stretching before your morning jog, wouldn't you be concerned by some strange man in sunglasses and a trench coat standing five feet away and staring at you for quite some time?)

The effects by ILM are mostly very good, the best of which involve an attempt by Alice later in the film to make Nick more or less visible with the use of makeup.  The building which is invisible in sections at the film's beginning is pretty nifty too, making for some good eye candy which goes a bit beyond the call of duty for an invisible-man movie.  We also get to see what happens to things like food and cigarette smoke when taken into the body of an invisible man; it's gross, but it's neat.  A lot of it is way too obviously blue-screened (a disembodied head jogging down the street isn't convincing in the least) but hey, it's only 1992.

Honestly, there isn't one thing in this movie that identifies it to me as a Carpenter film other than his name in the credits; a dream sequence with a great punch line about halfway through is a really inspired touch, but that doesn't feel like Carpenter either.  At the time, this was his first movie in four years, so maybe he was just rusty.  But if this was his attempt to "go mainstream" (and really, he's not all THAT far off the beaten path as a director), it was a crashing failure in terms of box-office, which maybe we should all be thanking our lucky stars for.

Like I said, it really isn't that bad, but it should really only be watched (with wide-eyed unrecognizing disbelief) by die-hard Carpenter fanatics, which, really, should be all of you.  

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