VideoKidVsTheVoid

This wildly imaginative, endlessly clever, candy colored, twisted, hilarious, gross-out, underground (maybe literally) sci-fi comedy is a one-of-a-kind wonder. Essentially the idea is a Jetsons-ish live action family TV sitcom satire set in an intangible time and place of some far off, distant dimension or universe where every daily necessity or modern convenience is pumped through a complex system of tubes. Oh, and everyone is careful not to fall off "The Edge." The basic plot setup is an intentional cookie cutter television sitcom template involving the father, Henry Hollowhead (John Glover) who works for "United Umbilical", bringing home his new slimy boss (Richard Portnow) for an impromptu dinner, leaving the homemaker mother, Miriam Hollowhead (Nancy Mette), reeling with the frantic task of managing her three stock character type children while trying to cook up an impressive feast.

The inspired fun and lunacy comes from how this simple premise is warped around, and manifested within the novelty of the created universe: The mother wrangles tentacles and squirts out doughy goo in the kitchen; the eldest son practices his bagpipe/keyboard/trombone/live-chicken-creature instrument for his big gig; the youngest son picks fat insects off the family "dog" ("he's infested") to use in his new "Splat Spray Game" with his troublemaking buddy Joey (pre-teen cynic, 80's cult regular Joshua John Miller); and their middle child daughter, a pre-fame Juliette Lewis, sprays her face with cosmetic machines in the bathroom, getting ready for a party. A whole system of amusing fictional terminology and lingo is even created (the daughter wants to use the mother's "Softening Jelly" and they threaten to discipline their children by sending them to the "Penetration Box") leaving the deduction of which up to the viewer's imagination.

Another delicious, bizarre and wonderful conceptual element is what lay beyond the walls of the house and what the outside world is like. The only scene that takes place outside the fantastical home is when the youngest son and his friend venture out through an abstract dark void to make their way to the main pipe station, to fill a list of ingredients for Mrs. Hollowhead. Along the way, they encounter a void bum, a team of "Reamers," that are dressed up in grey, brush outlined pipe cleaner tutus, and Stationmaster Babbleaxe (Anne Ramsey), who speaks with subtitles that even translate her grunts into insults (This idea might have been used due to the fact that because Ramsey suffered from throat cancer she had to have parts of her jaw and tongue removed, and as a result it affected her speech. She died shortly after this production and the film is "Lovingly Dedicated" to her.).

This was Thomas R. Burman's, a long time special make-up effects artist who has worked on everything from The Thing With Two Heads (1972) to My Bloody Valentine (1981) (he even worked with Anne Ramsey before on Throw Momma From The Train (1987)), first and only, so far, directed feature, but let's hope it is not the last. Lisa Morton co-concocted and wrote the great script in collaboration with Burman as a project for Burman to direct. Morton kept a journal during production which can be found online at Morton's site (www.lisamorton.com).

A good printed VHS and Laserdisc version was released by Image in November of 1989 but since then the film seems to have become public domain, because several super cheap video labels have released their own VHS and DVD versions with badly blown up pictures of Juliette Lewis on the cover, to cash in on her fame, and wrong credit listings. The film's original title was "Life On The Edge," but it was changed, and the film was cut and re-scored by the producers (they even added a horribly silly/stupid hip-hop/rap song to the credits). But even with those forced butcheries, the film remains astonishing. We would all lead happier, more exciting lives if more films like this got funded. Absolutely not to be missed! Highly Recommended!

A monotoned melancholy portrait; an idyllic suburbanite panoramic; the opening titles ripped in half and then thrown aside by the cold, nefarious looking grill on the shiny family vehicle. So begins the surrealistic misadventures in happy home horror. Young Michael suspects the left-overs. The social worker suspects trouble. And the charismatic girl from the moon suspects the carefree days of youth will one day come to an end; replaced by the responsibilities of adulthood. New nightmares of another kind, but for Michael the old fashioned ones are what worry him. A hand in the garbage disposal thrashing about to the sound of bone caught in the spinning blade, blood dripping from the freezer like melted ice pops, a limb hanging from a meat hook in the basement. What is real and what is dreams? But then again, that's life.

Solarbabies is a film that still remains in my head as a film, and not a production; which is very rare and hard for a person like me; one who constantly maps out the boundaries of the world of movies and their magic and experience, by devouring and disenchanting that world through personal obsession for all knowledge and nuances on a reviving daily reoccurrance.

Despite the film's easily written-off ineptitudes, cheesy sentiment, borderline incoherent silliness and visual limitations, it still manages to possess a strange magic;…….a sense of wonder, imagination, adventure and a youthful excitement towards limitless possibilities of a close but distant horizon of an unknown world, destination and future. Those wondrous currents that have surged through us all about what lay out there and ahead in our immediate and distant futures are here channeled in a sci-fi context, specifically a "what-if world"; a gift blissfully inherent to the post-apocalyptic genre but rarely fully capitalized on. And even if by the end of the film, what has actually passed before you has not fully realized your imaginative and spirited involvement, you still feel that an unspoken realm of something has traversed a larger sense of place and time and adventure. The fictional world (summoned up vicariously through small phrases and lines and referrals and emotions) feels bigger than what has actually been fleshed out in the end-product on screen.

I still feel that funny feeling of wanting to go beyond when the end credits begin to roll, and behind them the final images of the group running across a beach (did releasing the water also create an instant beach?…just another example of the film's either inept illogistics or ungraspable sense of self and place? Either way, the experience is there.) up to the water/ocean's edge and begin to splash about in the fulfillment(?) of their destination. It still feels like only the beginning of a story that I want to see.

Perhaps if a commentary track by anyone involved in the making of the film, had been put together and included on the recently released MGM DVD, which I so desperately wished it had been, maybe part of this distant wonder I carry for the film would have been slowly metamorphosized into an understanding of its all-to-real and finite existence/production within the realty of the real world (as it has happened many times before with other films). But as it stands, even with its easily recognizable faces and markings, Solarbabies still remains to me a large, distant occurrence collectively dreamt into existence by an unknown number of unknown people at an unknown place in the world (ok, Spain) at some nostalgic point in history, that was just slightly too far back for me to have been aware of its specific creation at a disenchanted adult hour of my life.