1996's The Lawnmower Man 2 Isn't Quite the Camp Classic Its Predecessor Was, But It's Still Stupid Fun

I wrote a blog post recently about how one of the only good things about social media is that when someone dies, it’s nice to know that other people care about them and are devastated by their loss. 

There’s something comforting and human about Twitter and Facebook's communal mourning aspect, where so much in cyberspace is scary and inhuman. 

Yesterday was a good reminder that you don’t have to be Jimmy Carter or Matthew Perry for your unexpected death to hit people hard. 

Scott Wampler, a writer, editor, and co-host of the Stephen King-themed podcast Kingcast, died young and unexpectedly.  

I never met Wampler but I was a fan. I was invited to talk about The Lawnmower Man on Kingcast. It was a real honor. I was excited to discuss that wonderfully ridiculous motion picture and invited Wampler to be a guest on the Fractured Mirror podcast I have been planning. 

Computer-themed entertainment from the 1990s is one of my many obsessions. I am a fool for a horror movie or thriller in which the bad guy is a computer and anything can happen in cyberspace because we genuinely seemed to believe that computers were magical back in the Clinton era. 

So I decided that I would honor Wampler’s memory in my own way by finally satiating my curiosity about The Lawnmower Man’s little-loved sequel, 1996’s The Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace. 

For the sequel to a surprise hit (or rather cyber-hit) that ranks among the least faithful adaptations of its ostensible source material in film history, the producers apparently wanted a Max Headroom vibe. 

They figured that, while everyone has some of that Max Headroom feeling, Matt Frewer must have it in spades since he is Max Headroom. So they cast Frewer in the lead role of Jobe, the simpleton turned super-genius Jeff Fahey (Easy Rider: The Ride Back) played in The Lawnmower Man. 

They did not stop there. In their bid to make the whole thing as Max Headroomy as possible, they tapped Farhad Mann, the director of “Blipverts”, the first episode of Max Headroom. 

Incidentally, King’s short story was about an insane, naked follower of Pan who mows lawns by getting on all fours and eating the grass like an animal. The Lawnmower Man, in exceedingly sharp contrast, is about a man who mows lawns for a living, becoming a cyber god after his intellect is advanced to superhuman levels by virtual reality. 

The only thing the short story and its ostensible adaptation have in common is a dude mowing a lawn who turns out to be a far greater threat than he initially appears. 

So many cinematic gems to discover in The Lawnmower Man Collection.

The money people understood, however, that attaching the name of perhaps THE MOST POPULAR AMERICAN WRITER OF ALL TIME would be good for business. So, in a colossal bit of chutzpah, they released the film under the title Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man until King sued them. 

King won. Then he won again when the incorrigible folks behind this opportunistic motion picture tried to once again sell it as Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man when a more accurate title would be The Lawnmower Man Who Has Nothing to Do With the Stephen King Short Story of the Same Name. 

Then again, that title is a little unwieldy. It might not fit onto a marquee, either. 

The Lawnmower Man opens with an explosion, or rather a cyber explosion, that catapults Jobe, the titular villain of The Lawnmower Man, from cyberspace to our world. Jobe nearly dies in the process. He loses his limbs and has burned over eighty percent of his body. 

An evil corporation run by malevolent Republican Jonathan Walker (Kevin Conway) is intent on developing a Chiron Chip, a cyber-McGuffin/Deus Ex Machina with the power to control every operating system in the world. 

The bad guys think the key to the Chiron Chip exists somewhere within Jobe’s shattered psyche. Others, however, worry that because Jobe is evil and insane, it would be a bad idea to give him unlimited power. 

Child actor Austin O’Brien, of Last Action Hero, My Girl 2, and Prehysteria fame, is the only alumni of the original film to return. O’Brien plays Peter Parkette, the Lawnmower Man’s good pal before he got all smart and all-powerful and crazy. 

Peter runs with a wild pack of cyber-ruffians who take to cyberspace to fly and drive cybercycles. Cybercycles are like motorcycles but in cyberspace. 

The Lawnmower Man 2 was a theatrical sequel to a hit film, yet it has an adorably homemade quality. It feels like the filmmakers told the cast to pick out their most futuristic clothes and wear them during filming.

Peter takes a break from flying through cyber-space to track down Dr. Benjamin Trace (Patrick Bergin), the eccentric founder of virtual reality, at Jobe’s request. 

Bergin was cast as a new yet familiar-seeming character after Pierce Brosnan, who played the genius scientist in the original, chose to make Goldeneye instead of this turkey. He made the right choice. 

Like Brosnan’s brainiac, Dr. Benjamin Trace apparently had to choose between becoming the world’s greatest scientist and male modeling. 

With his hair in a wild tangle of cornrows and dreadlocks, shabby clothes, and earrings, Dr. Benjamin Trace looks like a homeless pirate, but he’s sane enough to realize what a threat Jobe poses. 

Casting Frewer in the lead role is inspired for reasons beyond the actor being a preeminent cyber-punk icon. At his best, Frewer resurrects the cyber-smartassery of his most famous role. 

Unfortunately, The Lawnmower Man 2 doesn’t allow Frewer to have much fun. He spends much of his time onscreen sitting in a chair in front of a computer, cackling maniacally. 

In our world, Jobe is an amputee. In the magical world of cyberspace, however, Jobe is a golden God in flamboyant finery intent on destroying the physical realm through the Chiron Chip so that humanity will be forced to escape into a cyber realm where he has infinite power. 

All that stands in between Jobe and his dreams of cyber-domination are some punk kids and the world’s smartest super-scientist. 

The Lawnmower Man subscribes to a pre-2YK conception of computer technology in which, with the right tools, a cyber-hacker could hack anything: toaster ovens, Walkmans, and beat-up old VCRs. 

Oh sure, they might seem harmless enough on their own, but in the hands of a maniac like Jobe, they turn into deadly weapons.

Jobe posits himself as a cyber-messiah for a new world, but he uses the same canned patter as every other wannabe Jim Jones. 

The CGI here is wonderfully dated. It’s screensaver/Sega CD-level technology that represents the distant past’s conception of the future. It took me on a trip down memory lane, which is not necessarily what you want from a movie about a dystopian future. 

The Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyber-Space isn’t quite the camp delight that the original was, but it is distinctive in its idiocy and wonderfully off about the future.

Virtual reality and cyberspace have become forces, but not in the way this ridiculous B-movie envisioned. 

All the same, I’m glad that I finally got around to seeing this after having perused its Wikipedia entry obsessively at least a few times. 

It’s a patently unimportant movie, but I’ve made a happy life and career out of silly movies, great movies, and movies that fall in between. So did Scott Wampler. 

When I die, hopefully in the very distant future, you could do a lot worse to honor me than by seeing a silly movie in recognition of my passing. It’d be appropriate and god knows you have an enless array of films to choose, including Cobra, Nothing But Trouble and The Miami Connection. 

People unfortunately and inevitably die but movies live forever, even movies this patently absurd. 

Rando!Nathan RabinMatt Frewer, Patrick Bergin, Cyberspace