Baby Geniuses (1999)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Best movie ever!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This is one of the most legendary bad movies ever made. It's become iconic with how terrible it is. The good news is that at least it isn't worse than what most people say. The downside is that that's still very low. There was ONE good joke in this movie about how they make the police come to Babyco and that's IT. This was made by the director of "A Christmas Story" and it just so happens this one takes place around Christmas too. This movie tells the story about these evil scientists who discover that babies have their own language. After awhile, they "cross over" and lose all of their genius. The most insane thing is that there is one scene where a baby is actually able to speak intelligible English as babies apparently know every language out there or somewhere. A main conflict is that they can't talk to their parents, even though they SHOWED that they could speak the same language as adults! Babies are apparently also able to hypnotize adults in their sleep. You have to admit that is completely stupid.In about six minutes, they literally say "Diaper gravy" four times and there is absolutely no variant said at all. This is easily the worst movie for Channel Awesome Month and it's a shame it came out shortly after "The Big Lebowski". That's a better movie to show to your kids and that has over 200 f-bombs in it! There's like six minutes of nothing but babies just jumping around as they are apparently training. There's a baby that wanders onto the road with cars and nobody notices, yet when the baby wears a disguise on the street, somehow everyone notices him. It's hard to even believe this movie even exists, as I couldn't see how anyone would ever find this entertaining. 1/2*

Twins Sylvester and Whit have been separated since birth. Sylvester is raised in the lab to be a super baby under Dr. Elena Kinder (Kathleen Turner)'s method. He makes a break for it out of the underground militaristic Babyco lab but he is caught by Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd). Meanwhile, Whit was adopted by normal parents Dan (Peter MacNicol) and Robin (Kim Cattrall). Dan is researching baby talk but Robin suspects Kinder of stealing from his work. Lenny (Dom DeLuise) is the bumbling handyman.WOW! That giant baby is incredibly creepy. Testing on babies is as disturbing as it sounds. I'm sure everybody on set knew how stupid and problematic this concept could be. The problem is that nobody figured out how to make it work. In fact, it seems they actively made it worst. Certainly, talking baby has worked in the movies before. This one makes no sense even with the simple movie concept. Tonally, it is both serious and stupid with non of it being funny. The most impressive part is making the kids talk. The CGI baby work is pretty good considering the era and eventually it becomes a thing in commercials. Overall, this is terribly misguided.

I don't know how movies could possibly be so bad. I think this is probably in my top ten of the worst movies ever. The jokes are lame, the acting is terrible, and the lip syncing is horrendous. I think they did a better job making the animals talk in the live action Jungle Book. There should've at least been some clever lines of humor to make up for the other crappy things in it, but that was nonexistent. It is so bad it makes one want to die while watching it. Christopher Lloyd is also pretty awful in it, and he's usually a pretty good actor. The director was obviously not caring about quality at all when he made this movie. He figured the kids who watched it would be as dumb as the script. But that isn't true, because ever since I was young I found this to be horrendous. This movie should be much farther than 80 on the Bottom 100. I'd say more like five.

If you can imagine sitting next to a machine that makes keys for 92 minutes then you pretty much get the idea of the experience of 'Baby Geniuses'. I've seen bad comedies with cringe-worthy scenes but only a handful of them have a cringe at every single moment. But this stomach turning dreck reaches an all time low.The plot: Kathleen Turner plays an evil woman who runs a secret science lab to experiment on babies because she thinks that she may know how they communicate with one another. She wants to find out what universal knowledge babies possess before they gain their understanding of their surrounding. What does she hope to gain? Beats me.One of her nephews named Sly (his brother is named Wit) escapes from her lab by spitting water at his captors, punching them in the crotch and throwing them over his shoulder. This scene is as painful as they come.The movie basically rips-off two good movies: 'Look Who's Talking' in which we heard what the babies where saying, and 'Babe' in which the mouths of the farm animals moved when they spoke. The first worked because we never saw the babies talking and they were allowed to still be babies. The second worked because even when the mouths of the animals moved what they said was witty and smart.The infants in 'Baby Geniuses' talk in annoying pop culture buzz-words 'Yo-yo-yo' and 'Don't have a cow' and 'Diaper gravy'. When they speak bad digital effects make their mouths move to synch with the words. You know those cutouts of President Clinton that they use on Conan O'Brien where we see a picture of the President's face but his mouth is someone else's? It's kind of like that.I am not exactly certain at what point 'Baby Geniuses' made me question my faith in mankind but if I had to choose I would say it has to be the point at which a group of infants hypnotize Dom Deluise and force him to pick his nose. Even though this is the worst scene in the movie don't think that the rest of the movie gets elevated from there. At one point a baby disguises himself as an adult in an oversized hat and coat complete with cigar. Another scene allows him to whomp one adult in the crotch with ski not once but three times.When the babies move the special effects move their limbs to do unnatural things. The worst has to be one baby who dresses in a leisure suit so that he can dance like Travolta in 'Saturday Night Fever'. I witness this moment upon my return from a visit to the toilet (I saw it on television) and immediately felt the urge to turn around to go back.The movie is from Bob Clark a director who is hit and miss. He directed the wonderful 'A Christmas Story' but his also directed the dismal 'Porky's'. He directed the wonderfully hammy 'Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things' but he also made 'Rhinestone'. I have seen bad movies come and go but Clark seems to be striving to make 'Baby Geniuses' into a new all-time low. Mission accomplished Mr. Clark.