Hump Day Horribleness: ‘Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2’

One of the great features over at the Internet Movie Database is the Bottom 100. Based on ratings viewers of the site give to various films, the worst of the worst films get put on this list. Some of them are on and off in a matter of days. Others stick around for the long haul, showing just how much suckage they truly emit.

It’s time to look at these movies and determine where they stand. Do they deserve to be on the Bottom 100 list? Are they not as bad as everyone says? Will they be off the list any time soon?

Here’s the breakdown for this week’s film:

Title: ‘Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2’

Release Date: August 27, 2004

Ranking on Bottom 100 (as of 5/27/2009): #4 (based on 8,052 votes)

Why It’s Here: When first viewing this movie, you may wonder why it’s even on the IMDB Bottom 100 list. It’s a kid’s movie, so a certain level of schlock is expected, and it even sort of resembles a earlier, less cool, lower budget ‘Spy Kids’ kind of idea during the introductory 5-10 minutes. Unfortunately, once the story of the Kahuna (the ultimate superbaby) and Biscane (Jon Voight) begins, it’s all downhill from here. Voight is actually sort of fun (in a horrible way) as a cheesy German master-villain that oddly reminds me of an elderly Rutger Hauer. I’m almost ashamed to admit that, but sometimes the truth hurts.

Venturing further into the movie, it becomes clearly evident that ‘Superbabies’ is all premise with greatly under-achieved execution with laughable special effects. The fight scenes are thrown-together with half-ass wire work and shamefully employ puns older than Bob Barker’s belly button lint. The movie’s physical comedy consists of gags worn out in the silent era or stolen directly from The Three Stooges. The dialogue is painfully bad, even for a kid’s flick, but there are some irresistibly enjoyable lines of dialogue made humorous only by the fact they were uttered by veteran actor Jon Voight.

Lowest of the Low Moments: The movie runs fairly consistent when it comes to low moments. No scene stands out as especially bogus over the others, but ‘Superbabies’ does have on incredibly low moment that only appears before and after the movie proper… it’s the director’s credit. ‘Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2’ as well as it’s predecessor was directed by Bob Clark. A relatively common, unfamiliar name, but for we movie geeks who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s it’s a name that has a nostalgic vibration.

Mr. Clark gave the world my all-time favorite Christmas movie called ‘A Christmas Story’. Aside from this holiday classic, Clark gave us a couple other classics including the horror movies ‘Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things’ and ‘Black Christmas’ and we can’t forget he brought us the first two ‘Porkys’ films. Unfortunately, after ‘A Christmas Story’ Clark made the regretful Sylvester Stallone/Dolly Parton disaster ‘Rhinestone’ and he never really recovered after that. To see a filmmaker so inclined with great genre sensibilities take a long and lethal nose dive into a tiny bucket of sour lime juice simply breaks my heart. Then again, we can’t all be Stanley Kubrick.

Will it Ever Get Off the List: It’s my opinion that, while ‘Superbabies’ is an awful movie, it doesn’t seem to deserve being nearly so high (or low, perhaps) on the IMDB Bottom 100 list. What I attempted to keep in mind while watching the movie was that it is primarily a kid’s movie, after all and that has to play into it’s rating. So, given that [at least] 99.9% of users on IMDB are adults, it doesn’t make for a very unbiased sampling of the film’s target audience. With that said, I highly doubt this will ever make it off the list altogether, but I feel in time may squirm it’s way into a higher-numbers spot on the list and see it’s infamous notoriety as #4 begin to dwindle.

This YouTube video pretty much sums up everything you need to know…