Missed it! – The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Missed it! is a new editorial topic designed to present thoughts, ideas, and analysis on horror films that this writer has personally let slip through their fingers with no valid excuse anywhere in range. We all have movies that we haven’t seen for some reason and this is a segment that aims to take into account hype, time, word of mouth, and plain old intentions and applying them after the movie has finally been viewed. For this installment of Missed it!, I caught up with a film I have been strategically avoiding for as long as I can remember: The Lawnmower Man (Dir: Brett Leonard - 1992).

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, The Lawnmower Man is about a mentally disabled lawn boy who stumbles into the yard of a young and cocksure scientist named Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan). Dr. Angelo is working on some sort of mind condition VR simulations for creating some kind of generic super soldier. When Dr. Angelo’s best chimp goes haywire and uses his new found abilities to run amok of the lab, Dr. Angelo realizes that there is potential in the experiment if used properly. So naturally, Dr. Angelo befriends the mentally handicap Lawnmower man named Jobe and uses his virtual reality station to open and reroute new areas of his brain. This causes Jobe to get smart very quickly.

Of course, the evil government replaces the smart serum to the illustrious chimp intensifying “Serum 5”. Then the movie turns into an 80’s slasher which felt extremely out of place. It quickly becomes clear that the most prescient thing to talk about at the start of this analysis would be the virtual reality special effects.

Apparently, New Line Cinema didn’t want some kind of phony Virtual reality setup (i.e. shoot something on film and make it a bit pixilated), they wanted the true effects built from scratch. Needless to say, the sequences involving Virtual reality games and dream ventures look quite dated. I will admit that for the movie itself, it does work. In fact, if anyone remembers the movie 50 years from now, they can look back and say “ah the technology was moving so fast, so that VR crap probably looked like that back in old 92”. However, looking back on it, we have a very clear understanding of what kind of effects were available to filmmakers at the time. To put this in perspective, the monumental and jaw dropping effects in Terminator 2 were unleashed onto the public a year before The Lawnmower Man was even released. With this perspective, you have dated effects even for 1992 which comes off as lazy and sophomoric.

But let’s skip that obvious point right now. In fact, the virtual reality in The Lawnmower Man, I am completely willing to skip over because as I always say “strong and effective characters are the most important thing in a movie”. I mean, some of the effects in Evil Dead are terrible and I still love that movie! So therefore good characters can redeem this film!

It’s a shame they are all terribly drawn and enthusiastically doomed to a predictable end about 35 minutes into the movie.

Dr. Angelo is a scientist who we all understand fully within 10 minutes of the movie. He loves animals, neglects his real wife, is too preoccupied with work to run his household, and doesn’t agree with the same ideals as the people who are funding his research. So within those first few moments of his existence, I already knew how this was going to end. The sad thing is I am totally not one of those people. You know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s those people who refuse to lose themselves in the narrative. They try to analyze the film, not for subtext or inherent meaning, but for patterns of predictability so that they can tell everyone the ending before it even happens. This makes them feel smart. I think it’s sad. They wouldn’t be doing a whole lot of thinking here because we can see the end coming from a mile away. You then start to think that “no it can’t be that, that’s too easy”. Well it is. The filmmakers thought that little of you. Which is a good segue to get into Jobe’s character.

At the beginning of the film, Jobe is mentally challenged. He can still live a normal day to day life, but he isn’t playing with a full deck of cards. Jobe also happens to get beaten up once in a while by a priest (for some reason) and is a dynamo with small engines. Jobe starts to get his brain working correctly thanks to Dr. Angelo, but as soon as the “Serum 5” is introduced by the D.E.A Agent brother in law from Breaking Bad, Jobe can suddenly move things with his mind, and viciously kills anyone who has in any way wronged him (or people he cares about). Jobe kills the priest, a neighbor (who beat his wife and kids), and then a guy at the gas station who made fun of him once in a while. Well yeah the guy was kind of a jerk, but do you need to kill him? Really? Just slap that guy around a bit and it would have been plenty. Jobe probably just did it to show off his telepathy. Oh I didn’t mention that he could move stuff with his mind somehow? Yeah that did happen.

Did it surpass expectations? Well, I didn’t suspect that The Lawnmower Man was going to be a classic of Horror Cinema, so I would say it neither surpassed nor fell below expectations. I was suspecting a fun, but slightly dated film that would be a campy way to spend an hour and a half of my life. Turns out I was right. This would be the perfect movie to grab that pizza and six pack with a group of friends. It’s got parts of unintentional hilarity along with a ridiculous plot that doesn’t need to be taken seriously at all. Have fun with this one.

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