Ha ha and changeabouts, it’s Burl, here to review another
holiday holdover! It’s one of those body-switch pictures from the late 1980s, Vice Versa! Ha ha, of course you recall
that there were a bunch of movies made on this theme at that time: Like Father, Like Son, 18 Again and the dark horse, Dream a Little Dream! Ha ha, sometimes Big is included in this roster, but it’s
technically only half a body-switch picture, though it was twice as popular as
all the others! (All of Me is another thematically similar outsider, ha ha!)
I gave all of these things a pass back at that time, and
continued to ignore them long into my adulthood! But now I have a son myself, and
it made me think: what if this thing happened to us one day? Ha ha, I’d better
be prepared! So I sat down one recent evening and put on Vice Versa, which always seemed to me the most interesting of a
pretty anemic lot!
Here the dad, Marshall, is a workah*lic (natch!) department
store executive played by Judge Reinhold from Beverly Hills Cop and Gremlins
and Ruthless People! His son Charlie
is played by Fred Savage from The Princess Bride! Through a series of lazy plot convolutions, an enchanted
skull, stolen from the lamas of Nepal, ends up in their possession, and indeed
possession is the key word here, as it somehow effects a personality transfer! Naturally Marshall is in the middle of some kind of business deal, which the
child must now see through; and the father, entrapped in the corpus of his
issue, is forced to deal with tests and bullies and little girls, ha ha!
Of course this concept is inherently creepy, and maybe the
pleasure in watching these movies comes from observing how they attempt to
dilute or sidestep or otherwise wrestle with this built-in grotesquerie! Vice Versa tries to ignore the
implications until late in the game, when it briefly appears ready to embrace
the inevitable quasi-Oedipal consequences, in a scene in which the father, in
his son’s body, peers in as his eleven year-old son, in the father’s grown
body, prepares to make l*ve to a pretty lady! No, ha ha, it’s not his own
mother, and anyway this event is headed off at the pass before any actual
consum*tion!
I think the other notable aspect of these is that the screenwriters,
believing something inherently interesting will emerge from the situation, feel
free to stay as lazy as outfielders when creating their characters! They stick
with the stereotypes (overworked dad, fun-loving pre-teen) and add nothing to
them; the result therefore is simply one stereotype swapping places with
another! Ha ha, that’s certainly the case here, and, aside from the vaguely
Christmas-y setting, there’s not a whole lot else on offer!
But there’s a bit! We get some actual location work in
Nepal, which is pretty amazing; and the movie as a whole is more engaging than
it has any right to be! The supporting cast includes pretty Corinne Bohrer from
The Beach Girls; Jane Kaczmarek from D.O.A.; William Prince from The Paper; David Proval from Mean Streets; Elya Baskin from Deep Star Six; Jane Lynch from The Fugitive; and even James Hong,
director of Teen Lust! So there are a
lot of familiar faces, and that helps matters!
I don’t think the movie is going to help me much if I myself
undergo a body switch, but then again who knows! At least I can now say I’ve
seen one of these movies, and while I’m not going to rush out to see a second
one, I may give 18 Again a try, just
to see if the advanced ages (18 swapped for 81) makes any fundamental
difference! In the meantime I’m going to give Vice Versa one smoking skull mouth!
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