Weird Wednesdays: Innerspace

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Several weeks ago I saw Innerspace as part of Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday programming, my first watch of a movie I knew absolutely nothing about. While an avowed fan of both Gremlins and Gremlins 2, Joe Dante’s 1987 sci-spy Fantastic Voyage comedy rip had largely escaped my attention, and I entered the screening mostly wondering if it would just make me want to watch Clifford again. It did, but that isn’t really the point. Somewhere in this odd blend of anarchic comedy and limp romance were some homerun moments which haven’t really left my brain since I saw it, so here’s the crazy-ass brain-searing images which outlasted everything else I wanted to say about this movie I only sort of liked.

Martin Short’s Throat

The broad strokes of Innerspace follow disgraced test pilot Lt. Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quaid) as he guides a miniature submarine through the body of neurotic hypochondriac Jack Putter (Martin Short). While Pendleton must dive and survive the bloodstream and bacteria of a paranoid supermarket clerk, said clerk and Pendleton’s girlfriend Lydia work to track down a stolen microchip which would return Tuck to size. At one point, Pendleton – who is communicating directly to Putter’s  inner ear – instructs him to gulp some booze. We are then privileged enough as both movie-goers and humans to behold a deluge of liquid pouring down a massive prop of Jack Putter’s throat interior, one of many body spaces which Dante renders cavernous and awe-inspiring through a deft marriage of sets and effects. The alcohol replenishes Pendleton’s flask on the way down, of course. As far as jokes go? Pretty good! Movies can be anything you want, which includes a look into the finer points of Martin Short’s esophagus.

Martin Short’s Facial Malfunction

At one point, Jack and Tuck and Lydia square up against the villainous Victor Scrimshaw for possession of the unshrinking chip, which involves infiltrating a rogue’s gallery luncheon. Through some bewitchment of the biological form, Tuck reforms Jack face into that of a criminal known only as The Cowboy. It can’t last of course – before the lunch concludes, Jack loses control and his appearance snaps back. What follows is probably one of the most horrifying transformation sequences ever put to film; a face stretching and shrinking and squeezing and liquefying and reshaping between the serious countenance of Robert Picardo and Martin Short’s comic grotesquerie in an effects tornado with the panicked energy of a flu dream. I don’t really have much else to say about this one… if you thought the transformation sequences in The Mask were too normal or if you think about Floop’s Fooglies from Spy Kids a lot then this might be the movie for you.

Martin Short’s Stomach 

Any movie worth its salt – especially a goofy high-concept genre hybrid like Innerspace – can be judged by how hard it commits to the bit; or in screenwriting 101 speak, delivers on the promise of the premise. Innerspace keeps from going stale by constantly introducing new madcap wrinkles, the most obvious and most fruitful of which is turning the film’s central shrinking device on other targets. Here the film’s evil henchman Mr. Igoe miniaturizes to dispatch Tuck in the belly of the beast – Jack Putter’s belly, specifically. With clever thinking, Tuck and Jack knock the cyborg Mr. Igoe into a sea of smoldering stomach acid, buying time and saving Tuck’s life. The massive, rolling ocean of intestinal fluid is one thing, but the cherry on top is a stripped-bare skeleton which floats through the green brine past Tuck’s viewport. “You digested the bad guy,” he quips. Goofy! Fun!

Small-But-Not-Small-Enough Humans

There’s something really distressing about people who have been shrunk, but like, not actually shrunk enough to feel tiny and twee but just shrunk enough to sort of feel like an affront to God and man and sort of just the entirety of creation and laws of nature. Near the end of Innerspace a bunch of the villains get shrunk by the science machine as retribution, but not like Borrowers small, just small enough to be about three feet tall with the same proportions as normal humans like a real-life Photoshop resize and the whole thing left me feeling very unsettled and mostly just glad that it’s very unlikely I will ever have to fight for my life against a scaled-down geriatric in the backseat of a car. I think I could probably win but I also think the ensmalled person would have the element of surprise as I would see them and immediately feel fear or I’d remember those creepy fuckin’ old people from Mullholland Drive or remember this movie and the crazy scene where he sees a baby in the womb and I’d forget all my fighting techniques.

 The Crazy Scene Where He Sees A Baby In The Womb 

For my money, the most memorable moment in all of Innerspace arrives in its attempt to join the twin tones of wacko body comedy and relatively rote romance; a move which lives or dies solely on your taste for big swings and unbelievable images. At some point, Tuck finds himself lost in the body of Lydia, transferred via kiss – upon which he stumbles into her uterus, apparently, and is met with a truly titanic fetus. Surprise! Is this bizarre pregnancy reveal just another odd moment in a film packed with absurdity, or is it the mishandled and weirdly tender capstone on Innerspace’s love triangle? I lean to the latter, but whatever’s going on here had me obsessed for pretty much a full month. Whenever I think about writing serious criticism for this film I remember “oh yeah, that’s the movie where he found out he was gonna be a dad by going into this chick’s womb and seeing a baby” and pretty much every other thought I have vacates the premises. Should he have gone into Martin Short’s balls and diagnosed his low sperm count too?

Anyway, Innerspace has a lot of neat visuals and some good comedy from Dante but I really didn’t need the lame cishet romance or the fetus or any of that shit. Sort of feels like dropping a “no homo” on your film literally about a man inside another man’s ass. Innerspace 2023… can a high-strung supermarket clerk and an alcoholic test pilot who’s been inside his guts find love? Warner Bros, call me!