This is the movie Ed Wood SHOULD have made! :D Even among such 50s sci-fi gems as Mickey Rooney's Atomic Kid, this one has a special place. It's technically well done, despite it's charmingly low budget trappings and gut bustingly absurd dialog and plot points. The protagonist's family seem like the Cleavers after mucking around with the Krell mind-trainer from Forbidden Planet. Their 'intellectual' banter make the cast of Frasier seem like they stumbled in from an Ernest movie. Everything is wonderfully (and it seems, cluelessly) over the top. I guess this is how the writers thought REALLY smart people behaved. :) **SPOILER?** I don't want to ruin any of the absurdities of the "plot", but just to give an example of what makes this movie so special, when the boy asks about the deserted office where he finds the disassembled robot, his father just nonchalantly mentions a colleague who claimed to have built a time machine & brought the robot back from the future, then just disappeared one day. Since this earthshattering claim and apparent proof of the time machine's existence is tossed off with such disinterested casualness, one must assume this sort of thing is happening all the time at the braniac house where all the professors work on their science-genius stuff. A film like this could never be made again. I get the distinct impression that the filmmakers had no sense of irony or absurdity, and were just making a low budget kid's movie. This movie is a classic in it's own profoundly misguided way. Thank God for late night cable and the happy accident that brought this to my attention. If you ever like to have your own MST3K home theater experience, grab a few friends - or robots, and pop this gem in the player.
Review of The Invisible Boy
