Directed by John Hughes
Written by John Hughes
Starring:
- Anthony Michael Hall as Gary Wallace
- Ilan Mitchell-Smith as Wyatt Donnelly
- Kelly LeBrock as Lisa, the “perfect woman” they create
- Bill Paxton as Chet Donnelly, Wyatt’s older brother
- Robert Downey Jr. (credited as Robert Downey) as Ian
Release Date: August 2, 1985
Rating: 
John Hughes’ awful raunchy screwball comedy plays like a teenager’s androcentric wet dream rendered into feature length. Assemble a cluster of Brat Pack faces, feed them horny, witless dialogue, costume them as a garish New Wave band, and drop them into a hollow pop-culture charade, and the result is one of the most catastrophically misguided films Hughes ever directed.
Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith do solid work as two horny high-school outcasts whose romantic desperation mutates into fantasy, hijacking Frankenstein’s lunacy to build the “perfect” woman for their shallow male wish fulfillment. This plastic utopia is powered by the magical bullshit logic of a primitive computer, making it one of the dumbest teenage riffs on Frankenstein mythology ever conceived. Kelly LeBrock’s body becomes the punchline made flesh, and while that’s plenty offensive even by post-Porky’s standards, it’s not the movie’s ugliest sin. The real horror is that Weird Science never gives its own stupidity any rules to play by. Everything is ridiculous, yet Hughes offers nothing—no rhythm, no belief system, no internal logic—to make that ridiculousness work. It’s genuinely baffling that 1985 saw Hughes release both The Breakfast Club and this mess, the best and worst of his career colliding in the same year. The limp attempt to dress this sexist gag up as a lesson in confidence and self-worth only amplifies the bad taste, and not the laughs.
Even with its barrage of referential amusement—those moments when you think, “Oh, look, that’s a young Robert Downey Jr. playing the uppity poster boy,” or “Is that the guy from Mad Max 2?” or “Awesome, it’s psycho Michael Berryman on a motorcycle,” capped off by Bill Paxton gleefully embodying the resident douchebag—the film ultimately goes nowhere. It may function as a gaudy ’80s pop artifact, but as a film it collapses on a colossal scale, not strictly because of its political incorrectness, but because of its uncharismatic, aimless, and illogical universe.
