Igor

by Mark Demetrius | January 7, 2009 12:09 | Edited January 12, 2009 09:37

“…mildly diverting…”

You know how films for little kids often have jokes designed to go over their heads, so the accompanying adults can have some fun too? Well, Igor is chock-a-block with gags like that from go to whoa, which makes it weirdly difficult to identify its target audience. As does the fact that it hurtles along like a speed-freak with Attention Deficit Disorder.

The premise is quite good. A hunchbacked evil scientist's assistant is tired of his demeaning subsidiary role, and aspires to be an evil scientist himself. Not only is he called Igor, but there are lots of other benighted assistants, also all called Igor. Our titular hero sets out to build an incomparably destructive monster, and to thereby be the star of the imminent Evil Science Fair.

Many conventions of the horror genre are affectionately parodied here, while the (computer-generated) visual style of this animated feature owes a certain amount to darkness-master director Tim Burton, especially circa The Nightmare Before Christmas. The quasi-3D-come-noirish look is actually the best thing on offer here, as most of the humour is forced. Still, you can't beat a character name like Dr. Schadenfreude ("The Master Of Disaster, The Chief Of Grief"), or a place name like the Kingdom Of Malaria. The actors' voices accompanying this mayhem are mildly diverting, especially Eddie Izzard's as Schadenfreude and Jennifer Coolidge's as the dastardly femme fatale Jaclyn.

Igor sends up all sorts of cliches, but - by degenerating into a mawkish romance and a boring race against time - it also becomes one. There's a spectacular climax, but the absolute ending is pathetic,