Nutty Professor II: The Klumps Reviews

An amazing technical accomplishment that never becomes a coherent movie, this sequel focuses on tubby Professor Sherman Klump's (Eddie Murphy) efforts to rid himself forever of skinny, obnoxious alter ego Buddy Love (Murphy). Though Sherman won the heart of Carla Purty in the previous film, he's now pining for a new gal, brainy beauty Denise Gaines (Janet Jackson, bland as can be). A fellow geneticist, Denise sees the wonderful man beneath Sherman's portly exterior but is horrified by his occasional lapses into boorish lewdness; she's ignorant of l'affaire Buddy Love, and Sherman would like to keep it that way. Since Buddy is now asserting himself even though Sherman has foresworn the weight-loss potion that caused all the trouble last time, Sherman tries an experimental procedure to root him out at the genetic level. This procedure has the unfortunate side effect of diminishing Sherman's brain power; worse, the extracted Buddy DNA combines with canine DNA (don't ask) to reconstitute Buddy in the flesh. Buddy sets his sights on Sherman's newest invention, a youth drug that holds the promise of almost unlimited riches. Be warned that however unbelievable the plot sounds, it plays even more badly on-screen. This is probably because most of the filmmakers' energy went into Murphy's latex-assisted multiple performances as members of the morbidly obese Klump family: Mama, Papa, Uncle Ernie and randy Granny, who offers up more of her raunchy advice on marital relations. Murphy's work is impressive, wasted on a script that's little more than a string of jokes about flatulence, copulating animals and pendulous old-lady dugs. A lengthy parody of ARMAGEDDON (with a touch of STAR WARS) has little to do with the rest of the movie, and isn't particularly clever. The movie's highlight is a scene involving a horny, humongous hamster; it's as vulgar as everything else, but it's genuinely funny.