I just bought this videocassette in June, so it was atop the cabinet and awaiting quick viewing since I’m too lazy to actually open the (glass-fronted stereo) cabinet holding years’ (decades’) worth of accumulated unwatched videos. And as I popped it in, I thought it was odd that I had never seen the film.
Ah, but as I watched, I realized this was, in fact, a film that appeared on Showtime back in the day, and I had seen it probably more than once albeit not in over 35 years.
So it’s a bit of an action/comedy take on The Fantastic Voyage. Dennis Quaid plays a former Navy pilot working with a lab team working on minaturization; the lab team is going to shrink him and inject him into a rabbit. Just as the experiment begins, though, the lab is attacked by a black ops crew working to steal the technology. The lead guy takes the syringe containing the shrunken pilot and capsule and flees, injecting them into a hypochondriac played by Martin Short (not to be confused with the hypochondriac played by Tom Hanks–have we really lost the stock comedic hypochondriac character? Probably.). They, helped by Pendleton’s (that is, Quaid’s) reporter girlfriend (played by Meg Ryan) have to retrieve a computer chip and re-enlarge Quaid before his air supply runs out.
So it’s a series of chases, impersonations, and comedy that turns out all right at the end.
The film has Robert Picardo in it, and although I saw the name in the credits, I didn’t recognize him. It also has Henry Gibson and Kevin McCarthy playing the kinds of roles they did. I see a lot of overlap in their film careers around this time and have learned that they must have been part of the Joe Danteverse, the director of this film and others like The ‘Burbs. I shall probably forget this trivia presently, but I bet you know what you’re getting when Joe Dante directed a film.
At any rate, not a bad way to spend a bit of an evening, but since I’m not trapped in a tin can in a trailer park in 1988 with nothing but Showtime to occupy me, I probably won’t watch it over and over again. Especially since I have a full cabinet and the tops of two littered with accumulated things to watch and another book sale bearing down on me in two weeks where I will likely add to the pile faster than I watch them.
