Welcome to Unwatchable Week! Every day this week will feature a new installment of the most ill-advised exercise ever undertaken by a member of the reviewing press, as your faithful movie janitor (that would be me) continues his mind-numbing quest to watch every film on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. We've finally cracked the top 50, so there's no point stopping now.
Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace is, as you may have deduced, the sequel to The Lawnmower Man, which was once known as Stephen King's The Lawmower Man until the master of horror sued New Line Pictures to have his name removed from the credits. When you consider some of the movies Stephen King has seen fit to leave his name on, this would seem to be quite an indictment. Actually, King's problem with the movie is that it has absolutely nothing to do with his short story "The Lawnmower Man." As I recall, King's Lawnmower Man was a big fat naked guy who ate grass and any woodchucks that might be hiding in said grass, while New Line's Lawnmower Man was Jeff Fahey in a funny wig.
The 1996 sequel Lawnmower Man 2 offers neither of these options. Instead, it stars Matt Frewer as Jobe, the same character played by Fahey in the first movie. Jobe was once a simple-minded lawn care employee, until a scientist used drugs and virtual reality to turn him into an evil genius. When last seen, Jobe had entered cyberspace and was making all the phones in the world ring at once. He had his reasons, I’m sure.
As the second movie opens, Jobe is sucked out of cyberspace and imprisoned in a new body with only one working limb and Matt Frewer's face. He is now forced to work for James Lipton lookalike Jonathan Walker (Kevin Conway), who wants Jobe to finish building the special Chiron chip that will give him control over all the world's computer systems, and thus all its banks. Jobe dives back into virtual reality to find his old pal Peter, a teenager with a gang of VR hacker buddies. Jobe asks Peter to find Dr. Benjamin Trace (Patrick Bergin), the chip's original inventor, who can provide him with the secret doofalator bypass program that will allow him to unleash all of the chip's power.
Of course, Jobe plans to use the power for his own nefarious purposes, which James Lipton lookalike would have figured out if he'd seen the first movie. There's an awful lot of nonsensical techno-babble of the sort you used to be able to get away with in cyberspace-themed movies before everyone got access to the Internet and realized it was mostly useful for porn and twittering. There are also lame retreads of sci-fi action sequences familiar from the original Star Wars trilogy, and plenty of cutting edge mid-90s "virtual reality" graphics. (I was sure by now we'd have the special VR goggles that let us mingle with bigwigs at the White House or Playmates at Hef’s Grotto without ever leaving our parents' basements, but I guess those are still a few years off.)
If there's any wit to be found in Lawnmower Man 2, it's in the casting of Frewer, who was, of course, the original virtual star, Max Headroom. That joke gets sort of old once you realize Frewer is essentially reprising his Headroom performance, but without the cool squiggly video backgrounds. Oh, 1990s - can't you do anything right?
Previously on Unwatchable:
51. Simon Sez
52. In the Mix
53. Baby Geniuses
54. Meatballs 4
55. A*P*E