Sentimental and eccentric comedy of little interest.

This was pretty good when I was a kid. I seem to remember some kind of electric-shocking bed which was hilarious when I was a kid, but insane to think about now.

After Cutter's Way, Ivan Passer went onto this, a comedy-drama sci-fi about a mad professor (Peter O%u2019Toole) trying to clone his deceased wife, also starring Mariel Hemingway and a very young Virginia Madsen. It's a charming and light-hearted film, helped immensely by O'Toole, but sadly I have to remove a mark for the sudden turn at the end into an unnecessary plot event, one which feels emotionally cheap for a film that was trying its best beforehand.

The painful process by which the scientist comes to decide against playing God and settle for being a mere human (and, if not quite a full-fledged creator, at any rate a father) is full of authentic pathos. But though the movie is happiest in the pathetic vein, it spends much time poking around in other veins -- student romance, intra-faculty rivalry -- and with much less success.

Brilliant and hilarious