Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I’m a peaceable man by nature, and I know everyone has to make a living somehow, but I can’t help it: I really wish something bad would happen to everyone involved in making Baby Geniuses. I’m not talking about something life-threatening or even physically debilitating – I’m thinking more in terms of a flat tire, a tax audit or perhaps a visible soiling of pants at a high-profile public event. Actually, that last item probably did happen to one or two of the stars of Baby Geniuses, given that they were actually babies. I suppose I can’t blame these tykes for their roles in the movie, so instead, let us hope their parents had the courtesy to pay for the inevitable psychiatric counseling these toddlers required.

Baby Geniuses is, as you might have surmised, a talking baby movie. At the time of its release in 1999, the Look Who’s Talking series had run its course and America was once again hungering for verbose infants. Apparently. The premise here is that babies have universal knowledge up until the age of two – they have all the wisdom of the universe, but it vanishes once they begin learning to talk. Baby scientist Dr. Elena Kinder (Kathleen Turner, speaking her unspeakable dialogue in the thick Transylvanian accent she inexplicably developed in the early ’90s) and her colleague Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd) believe that babies under the age of two are communicating with each other in a secret language, and they plan to crack the code.

One of the test subjects at their facility, wisecracking toddler Sly, manages to escape. He is pursued into a shopping mall, where he inadvertently switches places with Whit, the twin brother he never knew he had. Whit had previously been adopted by kindly couple Robin and Dan (Kim Cattrall and Peter MacNichol); now he is in the clutches of Dr. Kinder and Sly is living with Whit’s unsuspecting parents. When Kinder figures out what has happened, she sends her minions out to retrieve Sly, and the final third of Baby Geniuses transforms into a tired retread of Home Alone, complete with plenty of groin injury humor.

I don’t think this is too much to ask: if you’re going to make babies talk, give them something funny to say. Austin Powers quotes don’t count. Salacious innuendo is probably not a great idea. When one boy baby asks a girl baby to take her clothes off and the girl baby responds, “You could at least buy me dinner first”…that makes me a little queasy. Also, while the “trying on funny outfits” montage is, of course, always hilarious, it looks like the baby is being manipulated by marionette wires when he does the John Travolta moves in the little white suit. I’m pretty sure this is illegal.

As I said, I don’t actually wish death on any of these people – not even Dom DeLuise, who performs a repulsive tongue-wiggling maneuver that cost me several hours of sleep last night – but as it happens, the director, Bob Clark, was killed in a car accident in 2007. Mr. Clark will always be fondly remembered for A Christmas Story, and no doubt many males of a certain age retain some affection for Porky’s, so it gives me no pleasure to report that the director’s final credit was SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2. It gives me even less pleasure to contemplate the likelihood that said sequel is lurking in wait, higher up the list of…the Unwatchable.



Previously on Unwatchable:
54. Meatballs 4
55. A*P*E
56. Araf
57. Phat Girlz
58. Ed