User Reviews

This family comedy is like that new co-worker that walked into the office and you just know immediately that it is not going to work out. Cliched from beginning to end, this instantly manipulates the audience by having a widowed father and his troubled son introduced to the audience to gain some sympathy, and dad gets a job working for Karen Black (typical monster boss, giving perhaps her most awkward performance), and of course, trouble ensues when dad ends up invisible thanks to stuff found in the garage that the previous owner had left behind) making the kid the hero of the day although his narration made him annoying from the start.

The supporting characters aren't any better, from the father's co-workers to the neighbors to the kid's friends, and what this ends up being is an instantly forgettable family comedy that explains why many films of the past 30 years have ended up going straight to video. This is the type of film that most families will start to watch and realize quickly that it needs to become invisible permanently from their collection. I only ended up with this because it was part of a box set that included the TV version of "Bye Bye Birdie". Fortunately it wasn't included on that disc so it was easy to separate and discard.

A spin-off from 1996's Invisible Mom, Fred Olen Ray's Invisible Dad gets me to watch his films as his films always do: I say, "Well, Karen Black is in it."

Or "Gary Graver is in it acting."

Or that the religious Common Sense Media said that it was a "highly improbable, groan-worthy, low-budget movie," which sounds like high praise.

Doug Bailey is our hero and he's very Johnny Quest in that he has no mom and travels all the time, so he really has no friends what with being the new kid in town all the time, which is a very 80s and 90s movie kid thing to be and probably points to the developmental mental trauma of screenwriters more than actual issues.

His dad Andrews (Daran Norris) has a weird machine in the garage - how often do they have to move this thing around? - that allows Doug to wish his dad would disappear, he turns invisible and hijinks ensue.

Now, take a look at that cover art. There's a manchild at a carnival with what we can assume is an invisible dad at the carnival and he's mindblown that dad is not visually appearing. If you liked this image and said, "I'd like to see a movie on the boardwalk with an invisible dad and his twentysomething son shouting," too bad. These aren't the same actors as in the movie and this scene never appears.

You do, however, get a scene where Invisible Dad wonders why he can no longer see his penis. In a kid's movie.

Never change Fred Olen Ray.