Barely Half an Experiment

As a kind that grew up in the 1980s, I had access to a fair bit of content on television that, for the most part, I barely paid attention to. You had a television with a cable box, a whole host of channels, plus the paid movie channels, and you’d surf your way up and down the dial looking for anything mildly interesting. For me there are all kinds of films I half-watched, catching snippets of scenes out of context while I played with action figures, or built things with LEGOs, or drew in notebooks while the films played in the background.

Sure, there were movies I actually paid attention to. But more frequently there were films that struggled in theaters before making their way to cable to act as daytime filler before the really good stuff came on at prime time. These filler films sometimes had one or two interesting ideas, with scenes that helped them stand out, while still being objectively bad on almost every front. As a kid with half an eye on the screen, I remembered these scenes while barely tracking anything else that happened. And so when, years later, I’m reminded that these films exist, I think, “yeah, that film was neat. I should go back and watch it…” only to realize the film was crap and I was a dumb little kid at the time.

I had this exact scenario happen not too long ago with House II: The Second Story, a film I remembered being really interesting when I was a kid, only to discover that it was actually a really terrible film that was, rightly, ignored by just about everyone. I then got to have this exact same experience just a few days ago when I saw My Science Project come up in my streaming suggestions queue. I saw bits and pieces of the movie when I was over at a friend’s house, and between the bright special effects, the creature makeup, and the time travel twist the film boasted, I thought, “yes, this movie looks pretty neat.” Spoiler, it is not neat. It’s a bad movie and the fact that it bombed in theaters (making only $4.1 Mil against its $10 Mil production budget) should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. This is a movie that was rightly forgotten.

Released in 1985, My Science Project follows Michael Harlan (John Stockwell), a gearhead high school student who only really cares about cars (most specifically his hot rod). He’s got smarts, but he spends his days working in the auto shop when he should be finishing up his class assignments. His science teacher, Bob Roberts (Dennis Hopper), gives Michael an ultimatum: turn in his science project, and make it a good one, or Michael won’t be graduating in a couple of weeks. Easy, right?

Well, it would be if Michael had even started on his science project. Without a clue of what else to do, Michael grabs Ellie Sawyer (Danielle von Zerneck), the nerdy girl who has clearly been in love with him for years, and they head out on a “date”, which is actually Michael dragging her to an old Army waste dump so he can dig around for something he can pass off as a science project. Except, what he finds is an alien device that, when hooked up to power, drains the electricity and starts acting really strange. Michael isn’t sure what he’s found, but he knows it’s something important. He just had to make sure not to destroy the very fabric of reality with his science project.

My Science Project is, frankly, about half a film. Its story is as threadbare as possible, and the movie pads its time watching the characters discuss the same plot points over and over again, barely making progress on the actual story until almost the last act. Then we get to the cool stuff, but by that point the characters have bored us so much that we no longer care if Michael passes his class, if he and Ellie end up together, or if the world is even saved from this clearly dangerous alien object that Michael too conveniently falls onto (literally).

A big part of the problem is that the alien device Michael finds is inscrutable. It glows and pulses, but its exact abilities are ill-defined in the context of the film. We eventually figure out that it sort of creates a time vortex, tapping into the very breadths of human history, but most of that comes from Bob as he is given a very Dennis Hopper rant while psychedelic lights play. It’s an exposition dump, done by an untrustworthy character, and it really doesn’t make a lot of sense in content until, in the last ten minutes of the film, we see knights and cave men and a dinosaur all sharing the same space. But by then it’s too late.

It also doesn’t really make a lick of sense within the rules of the movie. Sometimes you touch the device and it warps you elsewhere (although at first we’re led to assume it just disintegrates people). Other times it opens pockets in time… which also really doesn’t work because it’s opening pockets in time but to different places around Earth, and if it does that, what are the rules that guide how it does that? Is there an intelligence behind it or is it all random? If it’s random, physics dictates most of the “history” it would be tapping into would be the vacuum of space as the Earth moves around the Sun and the Sun moves around the center of the galaxy. The device is so poorly conceived that you can’t really care about anything that happens (when stuff finally starts happening).

That leaves you hanging out with a trio of unlikable characters you really wish weren’t in the film. Michael literally has no traits other than the fact that he likes cars. Ellie shows that she’s interested in him, but she’s not a car so he barely cares. He only uses her as a means to an end to get his science project done, so when the two of them fall in love at the end of the film, you don’t understand how. But then you also don’t know what Ellie sees in him because they have no connection and he treats her like dirt. And they’re joined on this adventure by Vince Latello (Fisher Stevens), Michael’s buddy, who is nothing more than an Italian stereotype made manifest. Just about any other characters would be better suited for this film, but these are the best we’ve got.

About the only thing the film really has is one halfway decent effects sequence at the end of the film. When the alien device gets fully powered, it blasts a hole through the ceiling of the school, and suddenly we get all the little pockets of time. Warriors run around, people fight, a stop-motion dinosaur appears, and we finally get something at least a little lively to focus on. None of it makes sense, it’s all B-level quality, but at least the film tries to have some fun. This is, quite literally, the only time I really cared about what was going on in the film, and it was only by degrees at this point.

In short, My Science Project sucks. It very clearly needed a heavy rewrite before it was even put into production. New characters, a punched up story, and more time developing the special effects were all needed. What we have is a barely strung together film that probably shouldn’t have been made. By high schoolers tinkering with time travel was a money-making proposition in 1985 (see: Back to the Future), so more than likely this film was rushed into production to try and feed off the expected blockbuster success of the other, better movie. It didn’t work and everyone promptly forgot My Science Project even existed. As it deserved.