To call this immeasurably terrible movie “stupid and nonsensical” would be an insult to stupid and nonsensical movies. So thoroughly wrongheaded that it demands a new redefinition of the word “bad,” it features perhaps the worst script I’ve ever come across, which appears to have been written by an extraterrestrial who not only does not understand English-language idioms or American pop culture but who has a completely alien understanding of concepts such as cause and effect, and hails from an alternate universe in which temporal and spatial relationships are unlike anything we on earth are familiar with. The plot is practically incidental to the awfulness, though on its own is an abomination: A creepy, perpetually childlike superhero, Kahuna, battles a media mogul who seeks to broadcast a mind-altering signal to kids over his satellite network, as if TV didn’t already do that; Kahuna is assisted in this quest by a quartet of diaper-clad preschoolers who communicate among themselves with baby talk (which does not approach anything like how small children babble), the secret language of babies. The “humor” ranges from the “adorableness” of kids behaving and talking like grownups to the “adorableness” of kids beating up grownups, featuring that old standup, the kick to the crotch. The kids are all portrayed by frighteningly precocious and fakely cute gangs of identical triplets; the mogul is, appallingly, played by Jon Voight (The Manchurian Candidate), who had been enjoying something of a comeback and appears to be seeking to throw it all away. I wonder which aspect of the film appealed most to him: the cheapness (with its characters who should be speaking onscreen but don’t, because then the actors would have had to be paid a lot more) or the rockbottom quality of its repulsiveness (the mogul’s signature kids’ TV program involves a horrifying “green face” frog character)? There is no reason for this move to exist, and a small part of my soul was eaten away in my act of viewing it.
