Generation X (1996) – Review

Back in the 1990s, long before Hugh Jackman was popping his adamantium claws as Wolverine, there was a group of people over at New World Entertainment who decided they’d to take a crack out bringing those wacky mutant characters of Marvel Comics into the world of live-action, and with a sterling track record that included adaptations of Thor and Daredevil what could possibly go wrong?

A made-for-television movie in the 90s tackling an adaptation of a comic book like the X-Men was never going to come close to being good – creating superhero effects for one mutant would strain most television budgets let alone a whole team of them – but the solution New World Entertainment came up with was to make the film about lower-tier mutants and then hope nobody would notice, the problem was that people didn’t just fail to notice they failed to even turn up to watch this trainwreck of a movie in the first place, with the predictable end result being another failed backdoor pilot that has been pretty much forgotten by even the most die-hard Marvel fan and is only available via poor quality YouTube versions.

“We mutants do not fear demonetization!”

The one and only thing that remotely makes Generation X watchable is the film’s villain, Doctor Russel Tresh (Matt Frewer), a scientist fired from his job for doing unethical and illegal experiments on Mutants, and the reason this is watchable is because of Matt Frewer’s over-the-top acting choices are so outlandishly fun that it alone will carry you through this 90-minute atrocity. The movie opens with his co-worker Emma Frost (Finola Hughes) bursting into an operating room just as he is about to perform some kind of surgery on a hapless mutant, as any self-respecting mad scientist would do, but there isn’t much of a happy ending here as the mutant is arrested and taken away for being an unregistered and the only repercussion seems to be Tresh losing his job. An angered Frost storms out of the room and then the movie jumps ahead five years to find her running Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters with fellow mutant Banshee (Jeremy Ratchford), and where the Irish superhero is more laidback Emma takes things a little more seriously, due to her losing a previous mutant group she led years ago, which begs the question “Why did Xavier hire somebody who had failed so colossally bad the first time?”

Do mutants have really strong unions?

The basic plot of Generation X deals with the students at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters having to set aside their mutant studies, which consist mostly of training to be a superhero and not much in the way of algebra or world history, to rescue fellow student Angelo “Skin” Espinosa (Agustin Rodriguez), a mutant capable of stretching, deforming and expanding his skin, who has been lured into the clutches of Doctor Tresh, but what exactly has Tresh been up to since he and Frost parted company? It seems that during their tenure together Frost told him all about the “Dream Dimension” and after being fired he turned this new knowledge and his talents towards the advertising industry where he made money brainwashing consumers with subliminal imagery, but then he used that money to build a machine that would allow him to access the Dream Dimension, something that mutants are apparently already hardwired to do, which would then lead, presumably, in him taking over the world, but as he puts it, “I won’t be happy until that psycho slut who humiliated me grovels at my feet and anoints me as her god!”

“Oh, Max Headroom, what has become of you?”

There are a variety of mutant students for us to follow but the key one in this film is new student Jubilation “Jubilee” Lee (Heather McComb), who has the ability to generate pyrotechnic energy blasts, and she leads the charge in rescuing Angelo because, like her, he also felt like an outcast even among fellow mutants. What doesn’t work here is that most of these teenage mutants look like rejects from a John Hughes film and their “Breakfast Club” antics are as cliched as they are boring and no amount of mutant powers was going to make them the least bit interesting, and when you don’t have a cast of credible or even likable characters to engage the viewer the only bastion the filmmakers have to save the film is in the action and visual effects area, needless to say, the $1.99 they spent on computer software to pull this off did not deliver on that promise.

“Next stop, the Low Budget Zone.“

Stray Observations:

• Emma Frost is disgusted that Doctor Russel Tresh suffers no punishment for his illegal mutant experiments, other than getting fired, but all she does is cause some wind and electric discharges to toss clutter around the room before storming out, basically, she did nothing as well.
• Jeremy Ratchford plays Banshee in this movie and though he also voiced him in the Fox cartoon he sounds like he’s auditioning to be the Lucky Charms mascot.
• In the comics the character of Jubilation “Jubilee” Lee is Asian, but in this movie she is Caucasian, yet they still left her with that very Asian last name.
• Doctor Tresh compares his “Dream Machine” to the ability of Freddy Krueger’s dream walking in Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but his intent is not to kill the dreamer but to influence their spending habits, making this movie the grandfather to Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
• Tresh uses his mind-controlling device to send his boss running out the window, which couldn’t have been more of a lift from Batman Forever if Mat Frewer had started screaming “Riddle me this!”
• I’m all for comic book accuracy when translating superhero costumes to live-action but having your school headmistress look like an actual mistress seems a tad odd.

“Today we will be discussing sex education and the role of the dominatrix.”

Where the film really drops the ball isn’t just in its failure to depict mutant powers in any believable fashion, which they do fail in that area rather spectacularly, what really kills the film is its complete lack of a consistent tone as in one moment we’ll be suffering through your standard high school teen angst, amped up by a little mutant drama – though with very little on-screen mutant power displayed – and with a dash of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off style comedy, then in the next moment we get Matt Frewer’s mad scientist threatening to mind-rape a teenage girl every night in her dreams if he doesn’t get his way. If I have to tell you that Matt Frewer licking a girl’s face in a dream world doesn’t belong in this movie then you are in a greater need of therapy than he is.

This joins my list of things I didn’t need to see.

We can be grateful that this low-rent X-Men movie was mostly forgotten because if the stench of this production had lingered the Bryan Singer X-Men films may have never been greenlit and without that success, the Sony Spider-Man movies could also have failed to materialize, so the very existences of the Marvel Cinematic Universe may owe itself partly to the complete non-entity that was Generation X, and sure, that may be a little hyperbolic but this is only to highlight just how bad this made-for-television movie actually was because neither Finola Hughes, in white latex hooker boots, nor Matt Frewer channelling Jim Carrey from Batman Forever, was going to save this film from the dustbin of comic book movie history, of course, this would be far from the last time a studio would screw up teen mutants.

Note: Fox would take another crack at the teen mutant genre with the 2020 movie New Mutants and while that film had some decent special effects on display the story, once again, failed to deliver anything remotely entertaining.