CommandoCody

Essentially a sequel to the lackluster Mandroid. During a scuffle with Drago, Benjamin Knight was accidentally rendered invisible and his pals are allegedly trying to restore him to normal. Wade certainly wasn't working too hard on the problem. He was busy developing a pair of special sunglasses that enable the wearer to control the Mandroid. Meanwhile, Zanna went from brunette to blonde. Drago, thought to be dead is very much alive and has set up shop in an old asylum. There he finds a small army of empty-headed lunatics willing to do his bidding. For reasons that escape me, he kidnaps women and imprisons them in the asylum. He forces them to do table dances for him and his men. The ugly Drago still wants the formula for the supercon element. Drago is not alone, a doctor at the hospital that Ben was in reports to Colonel Petroff, the local police chief, about Ben's invisibility. Petroff wants the secret so now he and Drago go after Zanna. It's up to wheel chair Wade and the Invisible Ben to save her and foil the evil Drago and despotic Petroff.

This movie is cheesy, corny, and misleading. It's full of improbable villains, pseudo cliffhangers, and sci-fi hokum. Based on the title one would expect it to concern Benjamin Knight and his invisibility. Instead, it's a continuation of the boring Mandroid story, tarted up with peripheral adult subject matter and a nude scene. It aims to deliver fast-paced action and a minimum of technobabble and succeeds to a degree. On the other hand, it suffers from too many subplots and horny lunatics are not exactly my idea of comic relief.

A half-hearted attempt to update the classic H.G. Wells story, this series featured Dr. Daniel Westin, a scientist at the shadowy KLAE Corporation, who stumbles across a means of making objects invisible. The series came out shortly after Watergate. Consequently, so when Westin learned that Uncle Sam planned to use his invention for military use, he turned himself invisible, destroyed his equipment, and promptly escaped. However, his method for becoming visible failed to work leaving him invisible permanently. A scientist friend creates a realistic face mask with a built in wig, and plastic hands to conceal his invisibility.

Daniel and his wife Kate returned to work for the KLAE Corporation, where he continued his experiments in order find his way back to visibility. In exchange, Westin ironically uses his new powers to work for the government. He spends the remainder of the series undertaking secret missions often aided by his wife. The special effects were quite good but all too often the plots were tired, juvenile, a full of clichés. As a result, the show disappeared without ever realizing it's potential.

After two failed attempts by the major networks to do a successful series about an invisible man, cable TV gave it a try in Y2K. Their version differed from the others and the movies; not necessarily for the better. First, the invisible man was a loser, a third rate, second story man, named Darien. Turns out he's not a very good thief either (too bad they didn't recruit Nyah Nordoff-Hall). After going down for his third strike, he faces life behind bars with no parole. His scientist brother offers him a way out. All Darien has to do it allowing his brother to put an experimental gland in his head that can make him invisible occasionally. Opting for the gland should have been a no-brainer. This moron however, actually had to think over which was preferable--not a good sign. I'm sure the idea was to give the show an "edge" by making the invisible man a cool and macho anti-hero. Given that his favorite expression is "Aw crap," I'd say that they missed the boat on that one.

Anyway, this mysterious gland causes him to secrete "quicksilver," a so-called, light bending substance. The first time he transforms is admittedly eye opening. Darien fades out much quicker in subsequent episodes. I've always had problems with the notion of quicksilver. Since light travels over 186,000 miles per second you'd need the gravitational pull of a black hole to alter its course. If light was bent around Darien, then no light passed through his retinas so he should see nothing but total darkness. Quicksilver is a mercury-like liquid so why doesn't it rub off on bad guys when he punches them? In one episode, quicksilver was cold enough to freeze the mechanism of a time bomb. Yet, Darien can be seen by thermal imaging goggles which register heat.

I could easily go on questioning how quicksilver allegedly works but why bother. What it really does is save money on special effects. It also enables Darien to keep his clothes on unlike Jack Griffin, so he can enjoy the advantages of being invisible without facing any of the, ah hem, "hardships." To pay homage to HG Wells however, Darien will go insane without regular injections of quicksilver counteragent supplied by a secret, no budget government agency. This supposedly forces Darien to work for these clowns who apparently handle foreign and domestic problems the FBI and CIA apparently care little about.

A better name for this series would have been Vanishing Man. Darien spends an awful lot of time in a very opaque state, whining and bickering with that grouch of a partner he was paired with-Bobby Hobbes. As a result, I often found myself siding with the show's recurring villains-Arnaud and Stark. I found them to be much more interesting to watch than the guys chasing them. The show was canceled following its second season cause the ratings failed to justify production costs. Aw crap.