A Future Camp Classic

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID

DIRECTOR: RANDAL KLEISER

WRITERS: THOM EBERHARDT, PETER ELBLING AND GARRY GOODROW

THE BOTTOM LINE: Paced like a cheerful comedy, the movie busily denies its true, quite perverse nature.

Godzilla with diaper rash? The terrible twos writ terribly large? How to characterize a film about a baby whose eccentric inventor father accidentally turns him into a 112-ft.-tall monster and who toddles off toward the bright lights of Las Vegas, wreaking innocent havoc along the way?

The film's creators resolutely play it for laughs. The actors gamely keep striking comic poses and speaking their lines just as if they were funny, though they rarely are. But Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (which, as the title implies, is a sequel to the megasleeper of three summers ago) is actually a horror movie -- a horror movie that is deep in denial, refusing to own up to its essentially dark, not to say twisted, nature. There are moments when you find yourself wishing Disney had turned the darned thing over to David Lynch and let him make a damned thing of it.

Or that they had more closely calculated the effect of having Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) reverse the process that made the first picture so successful. When Wayne inadvertently shrank his kids to the size of insects, he turned them into victims whose plight evoked -- dare one say it? -- a degree of pity and terror. Well, a certain agreeable suspense at the very least. But this time, when Pop accidentally inflates the kids' little brother Adam (played by twins Daniel and Joshua Shalikar), he creates not so much a sympathetic character as a really nightmarish creature.

Like, say, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms or any of the other gigantic projections of our early atomic-age anxieties. Like them, Adam is the product of careless science run amuck. Like them, he is pre-moral, not amenable to reason. And like them, his most gripping moments occur when he is looming over a cowering city, with older brother and his girlfriend (Robert Oliveri and Keri Russell) tucked in his pocket and distinctly at risk, since they and their car look like toys to him.

At this point Honey gets very interesting. You can have a good -- or, anyway, a weird -- time at this movie if you keep rewriting it in your head as it careens along. For this is one of those rare moments when moviemakers, going about the routine business of digging for sequel gold, have struck a rich vein of surrealism and need our help in identifying the treasure they have found: the stuff of what may someday be a camp classic.