The Heavenly Kid (1985)

Funny how these things turn out.  Just three days after watching the wonderful Back to the Future, a movie made with heart and cleverness, comes The Heavenly Kid, which has the same plot about teenagers meeting their parents through magical intervention.  The problem is that this movie doesn’t have a heart, a sense of itself, a sense of characters or a sense of humor.  It’s all just gimmicks, lame and tired jokes and missed opportunities.

The plot this time involves a cool biker from the 60s named Bobby Fantana (Lewis Smith) whose dream is to live fast and die young, so he does.  He goes to a weird purgatory that looks like a punk dance club and meets up with his scruffy handler, a guy named Rafferty (Richard Mulligan) who tells him that he can only earn his way into Heaven by going forward in time to help out his son who is having romantic problems.

Actually the kid, named Lenny (Jason Gedrick) is a George McFly clone, klutzy and awkward and eternally making a fool of himself.  So, Bobby sets out to give him some style and hopefully a sense of self confidence.  But the movie doesn’t handle this very well.  The kid is a mess and makes a disaster of everything he touches but it is never played with any heart, or any sense of its characters.  It’s all written at a base level, base characters, base situations that would be fit for a TV sitcom.  See Back to the Future instead, you’ll be glad you did.