Film / W.E.I.R.D. World (1995)

W.E.I.R.D. World was a 1995 feature-length pilot episode for a planned series of the same name. Directed by William Malone and produced by Joel Silver, apparently as a spin-off of Tales from the Crypt, it was inspired by EC Comics' sci-fi output in Weird Science and Weird Fantasy and would have featured similar stories in the same vein had it taken off as a series. Due to a Troubled Production and lack of audience interest, it never made it that far, and now exists only in its pilot form as a Made-for-TV Movie.

The story takes place at the Wilson Emory Institute for Research and Development, known more simply as W.E.I.R.D. Labs, a mysterious top secret research laboratory situated on a derelict airbase somewhere in the deserts of California. Headed by the sinister Dr Monochian, it concerns itself with a vast array of scientific research featuring everything from biowarfare to time travel... and thanks to the veil of secrecy, every single scientist and official on the payroll seems to have skeletons in their closets.

As such, the film is divided into three sub-plots, each one focusing on different members of the research team: ambitious psychopath Dr Dylan Bledsoe is hard at work on weaponizing a deadly virus, while also trying to seduce the pretty young assistant of his rival, robotics expert Dr Noah Lane - who suspects Bledsoe of murdering his ex-girlfriend. Dr Patty Provost has successfully developed time travel, oblivious to the fact that her envy-plagued brother Bob (the security chief) has betrayed W.E.I.R.D. labs and is planning to sell her discovery to a rival organization. Finally, the long-suffering Dr Abby O'Reardon is rapidly getting sick of her colleague and boyfriend Dr Bryan Mayhew stealing all the credit for her hard work and hopes to make him live up to his promise to provide her with a child - and her newest discovery might be the perfect means of doing so.

Not to be confused with the Weirdworld comic series.

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W.E.I.R.D. World contains examples of:

• Ambiguously Evil: Dr Monochian is more than a little bit on the menacing side, featuring a Creepy Monotone and Sinister Shades, ordering his assistant to have a Child Prodigy's parents disposed of if they don't check out, being so blase at the deaths around the labs that he remarks that he'll need a scorecard, and subtly threatening to have Bledsoe killed if he takes his work elsewhere. However, Monochian is never seen doing anything overtly villainous and serves as a neutral administrator throughout the pilot, to the point that it's left ambiguous as to whether he believes the official information on Bledsoe and Mayhew's fates or whether he's knowingly covering up the truth. Since the series never came to be, it was never made clear if Monochian would have turned out to be truly villainous or just an extremely creepy Big Good.
• Being Evil Sucks: Bob Provost is betraying W.E.I.R.D. Labs for money and revenge against his sister Patty... and it's made his life even worse as a result: his Mysterious Employer bullies, humiliates, and physically assaults him, he runs the risk of being killed either by said employer or Monochian, and it's clear that it's amplified his inferiority complex, as he later bemoans the fact that his new employers are more interested in Patty than him. Even Patty can't help feeling sorry for him.
• Bittersweet Ending: On the upside, Bledsoe's bioweapon program died with him, Abby is finally free of Mayhew's smothering influence and can now hopefully raise baby Bryan to be a better person, and W.E.I.R.D. Labs now welcomes a new member of the team - Albert Einstein! On the downside, Patty is in mourning for Bob, Noah looks to be having some trouble keeping up the pretense of being human, and the organization that was paying Bob for information is still out there - and would presumably have become a series-wide villain if the pilot had taken off.
• Chekhov's Gun: Abby O'Reardon prepares regular doses of cortisone to treat Mayhew's arthritis. Later, she exploits this habit in order to give him an injection of her youth serum before he can stop her.
• Child Prodigy:
  • Dr Monochian introduces W.E.I.R.D. Labs via a tour for the youngest prospective researcher, an elementary-school-age prodigy by the name of Susie. She's apparently a student and researcher at Harvard, specializing in a variety of fields including quantum physics and genetics, and though she's never seen again after this - and the series never took off, so her character never got any further than this scene - Dr Monochian has her parents investigated just to make sure that it's safe to recruit her without killing them first.
  • Given that Abby, Noah, Bledsoe, and Patty are all quite young, it's indicated that they started off as child prodigies and Teen Genius types before W.E.I.R.D. Labs snapped them up. Abby herself is currently twenty-six and has already come up with an invention that will easily win her the Nobel Prize if Mayhew doesn't steal it.
• Contraception Deception: Bryan Mayhew's horribly exploitative relationship with Abby O'Reardon has remained intact solely due to him promising to give Abby a child. Needless to say, Abby is enraged to discover that Mayhew secretly got a vasectomy and has been stringing her along for years, presumably for the sake of using her for credit theft. As such, Abby's revenge features her dosing him with her youth serum and not giving him the antidote until he's a toddler, making Mayhew into the child she always wanted.
• Death by De-aging: Dr Abby O’Reardon has invented a youth serum but hasn't yet developed the antidote that can stop the rejuvenation process before this trope ensues. As such, when she decides to test it on the obnoxious Dr Mayhew without his permission, he's more than a little bit concerned; however, after three hours with no effects, he's convinced that the serum didn't work and feels safe enough to leave the lab... only to end up calling Abby in a panic when he finds himself back in his twenties and getting steadily younger. By the time he returns to the lab, he's a child and clearly convinced that he's just about to regress out of existence, judging by the terrified whimpering. However, Abby then reveals that she's had an antidote all along and she was just fucking with him.
• The Dog Bites Back: After being seduced by Blesoe, Noah's assistant Diane is subjected to a heartless mocking when it looks as if she's actually a robot - and left doubly heartbroken when it turns out that Bledsoe was just using her to get to Noah. As such, when Noah turns the tables on Bledsoe, Diane just leaves her ex-lover to suffer without so much as a guilty twinge.
• Dramatically Delayed Drug: Abby takes revenge on her Mayhew by injecting him with her prototype youth serum against his will. After several hours with no effects, Mayhew leaves the lab in an extremely smug mood, believing that Abby's masterpiece was a failure. However, while he's driving across the desert roads between W.E.I.R.D. Labs and the nearest town, the serum takes effect quite dramatically... and given the distance he's just travelled, he can't make it back to the lab before he's grown too young to safely drive. In the end, he has to be escorted back to the labs by the police in the belief that he's a minor clowning around in his dad's clothes, much to Abby's amusement.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Abby is not happy at being treated like Mayhew's assistant when she's directly responsible for the scientific achievements he's claimed credit for.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Dr Dylan Bledsoe coldly watches one of his work colleagues dying from the virus they were studying and throws him a quarter for "winning" a bet over the transmission vector, then goes on to sidestep all blame by putting all responsibility on the victim and Dr Noah. For good measure, he follows up by fatally infecting his lover Catherine.
  • Patty and Bob Provost are seen quietly bickering at Catherine's funeral, with Bob getting indignant at his sister taking the side of the most intelligent man in the room, an early hint that he resents her for being a genius.
  • Abby O'Reardon and Bryan Mayhew observe the aforementioned argument with some amusement, before Bryan tells Abby to finish the lab work before his meeting with Monochian, treating her more like an assistant than a partner.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: Despite openly betraying and almost murdering his sister, Bob Provost's death is met with grief and remorse by Patty.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: During the final confrontation between Noah and Bledsoe, Noah's voice begins to sound suspiciously electronic. Seconds later, he rips his face off to reveal that he's a cyborg.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Early in the film, Lucy provides Abby with Dr Mayhew's medical records, though it's not known why she wanted them or what she hoped to learn - up until she confronts Mayhew over him secretly having a vasectomy. Given how early she discovered this detail, this was almost certainly the point she decided to use Mayhew as a test subject as revenge.
  • Not long after receiving the records, Abby snarkily tells Mayhew that he really should go through with their plans to have a child, as having a baby would make him feel young again. It's the first indication that she's secretly planning to give him a shot of youth serum.
  • When Patty Provost shows Bob the future newspaper revealing her death, Bob notes that his name isn't mentioned anywhere in the article. Also, the title refers to her as "Pat". It's a hint that the newspaper mistook the dead Bob for Patty thanks to her ID.
• Fountain of Youth: Dr Abby O'Reardon has successfully developed a youth serum which she eventually tests on Mayhew. Finding himself restored to his twenties, he's initially overjoyed... only to find himself hurtling backwards through his teenage years soon after. Before long, he's so young that he' can no longer safely drive, is caught wandering around town by the police and escorted back to the lab - by which time he's a child and getting steadily younger between cuts, much to Abby's amusement. We don't see how young he actually gets before the antidote takes effect, but in the finale, Dr Monochian announces that Abby has adopted a baby, indicating that she deliberately took her time.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: In the finale, Noah reveals that after Bledsoe seduced his lover Catherine, he was so overwhelmed with despair that he remade himself as a cyborg so completely that nothing remains of his organic self - a fact that he reveals by literally tearing off his face during the final confrontation. On the upside, this makes him effectively immune to the virus when Bledsoe tries to use it on him.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Bob Provost feels like an underachiever next to his sister Patty and the other geniuses at W.E.I.R.D. Labs, ultimately betraying them out of envy-driven resentment. This improves absolutely nothing for him, because his new employers don't think he's that special either and only want him for what he can steal from Patty.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: All three main villains are undone by their own methods.
  • Dr Dylan Bledsoe exposed Catherine to a deadly virus so he could use her corpse to smuggle it into W.E.I.R.D. labs, attempts to steal Dr Noah's robots to handle the stuff more effectively, then tries to expose Noah to the virus when the murder is discovered. However, Noah is a Full-Conversion Cyborg and therefore immune to the virus, so the struggle ends with Bledsoe getting his HAZMAT suit ripped open, leaving him to slowly expire from his own bioweapon. For good measure, Noah makes sure he can't infect anyone else by having one of his robots restrain him in the lab until he's finally expired.
    Noah: You wanted the damn robotics? You got 'em, pal.
  • Bob Provost betrays his sister Patty by stealing her prototype time machine, fully intending to kill her once he's finished. However, he also uses said time machine to dodge W.E.I.R.D. Labs' security by sending himself back twenty minutes before he arrived at the labs that evening... only to wind up getting accidentally run over by his past incarnation on his way to the labs.
  • Finally, Dr Bryan Mayhew once again muscles in on another one of Dr Abby O'Reardon's experiments, fully intending to take all the credit for her success in much the same way as he's always done, all while denying her the child he'd promised her at the start of their relationship. Abby agrees to his terms... and gives Mayhew a very prominent role in her project by testing the prototype youth serum on him: by the end of this plotline, Mayhew has been regressed to infancy and adopted by his former research partner.
• Hourglass Plot: Abby's plot begins with her being condescended to by Mayhew, who expects her to be a good little assistant while he calls the shots and wins all the accolades; it ends with her condescending to Mayhew and making it clear that she expects him to be on his best behavior while she calls the shots and wins all the accolades. This is because he's been regressed to childhood and Abby is now essentially his mother.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Currently in his forties, Dr Bryan Mayhew has pretty much gone to seed, but it's hinted that he was much more handsome in his younger days, when he met Abby. It's confirmed when Abby gives him a shot of her youth serum, as he proves to be much more attractive in his thirties and twenties... before the regression starts picking up speed.
• Masquerade: It's for this reason that W.E.I.R.D. Labs is hidden away in a derelict airbase, and research inside is so sensitive that any mention of it to the outside world is not only forbidden, but judging by Monochian's hints, terminally so. Indeed, it's so extreme that Mayhew keeps his mouth shut even after he gets regressed to childhood by Abby's youth serum, relying on his ID to get him back to the lab without revealing any secrets.
• May–December Romance: Abby is twenty-six and in a relationship with Mayhew, who is forty-two and seems even older thanks to his balding dome and arthritis. As such, she regularly pressures him to live up to his promise to provide her with a baby before the two of them get any older, though Mayhew continuously puts it off in favor of stringing her along a little further.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Abby spends her entire plot being humiliated, gaslighted, condescended to, and robbed of all credit by Mayhew. The final straw turns out to be the realization that Mayhew had a vasectomy and was never going to give her the child she wanted. So, once she sees the opportunity, she sinks the knife all the way down to his spine by injecting him with her youth serum. She then takes great delight in humiliating Mayhew when he turns up as a child and makes it abundantly clear that she's going to be calling the shots from now on.
• Mysterious Employer: Bob Provost's contact; it's not known who he's really working for and never specified, though it would have presumably been elaborated upon had the pilot taken off into a proper series.
• Never My Fault: Dr Bledsoe, in keeping with his characterization as a heartless psychopath, denies all blame for any of his actions, even claiming that the death of his colleague Eddie was due to Dr Noah not providing them with robots to safely handle the virus.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Lucy the secretary gets a little bit too tipsy at a local bar and reveals the details of Abby's secret project to Dr Mayhew. However, its indicated that Lucy was faking it, as leaking this info allows Abby to get Mayhew exactly where she wants him.
• Out-Gambitted: Thanks to a little drunken help from Lucy, Dr Mayhew thinks he's uncovered Abby's secret project, undoing all her plans to gain a little bit of scientific credit and forcing her to give him a very pivotal role in the project. Unfortunately for him, the pivotal role is as a test subject for a youth serum. And in the finale, it's that Lucy was working with Abby all along, revealing Mayhew's entire comeuppance was engineered by the two of them from the very beginning.
• Pretending to Be One's Own Relative: Enforced; when a newly-regressed Bryan Mayhew is brought back from the lab, Abby pretends that he's her son, even covering up her blurted outburst of "Bryan" by claiming that he's "Bryan Jr."
• Prophecy Twist: Patty Provost's time travel experiments uncover a newspaper article revealing that a Dr Provost will be killed in a hit-and-run the next day. Believing that this guarantees his victory, Bob Provost kidnaps her that night and steals her time machine; once he's finished using it to travel back twenty minutes so he can avoid tripping W.E.I.R.D. Labs' security systems, he takes Patty outside, fully intending to run her over with his car. However, a crash forces him to continue the chase on foot, and after a struggle over the time machine in which Bob is tricked into grabbing Patty's ID instead of the device, he blunders into the road... and is accidentally run over by his past self en route to the lab. Thanks to the ID card on the body, Bob is mistakenly identified as "Doctor" Provost until - as Patty reveals in the after-action report - the newspaper sheepishly prints a retraction a couple of days later.
• Public Domain Character: In the finale, Patty Provost's time travel experiments allow Albert Einstein to join the research team.
• Raise Him Right This Time: The ultimate fate of Bryan Mayhew, regressed to infancy and doomed to be raised again as Abby's son, with higher standards of behaviour in mind.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Cold, creepy, and murderous though he may be, Monochian abides by a strict policy of fairness at W.E.I.R.D. Labs and will not allow his scientists to be coerced into using their creations in ways they disagree with. For good measure, it's heavily implied that he disliked Mayhew's treatment of Abby, judging by some of his more acerbic remarks in the finale, and he may have even covered up Mayhew's unwilling regression into Abby's son as a favour to her.
• Released to Elsewhere: In the finale, Monochian explains away Mayhew's absence by claiming that he's "finally taken a well-deserved sabbatical" and left Abby with the work of raising their new son. As Mayhew is notorious for doing exactly this, nobody questions it. In reality, Mayhew has been regressed to childhood and is now permanently in the role of Abby's son, and it's left ambiguous as to whether or not Monochian really knows this.
• Robot Master: Dr Noah Lane, the base's robotics expert. Not only has he created a giant robot to guard the facility's corridors at night, but he's also created replacement cyborg limbs for his assistant, and even remade himself into a Full-Conversion Cyborg on his own.
• Robotic Reveal: In the finale, after discovering Bledsoe's crimes, Noah reveals that he's a Full-Conversion Cyborg by literally ripping his face off to reveal the mechanical skull beneath it.
• Safely Secluded Science Center: W.E.I.R.D. Labs is situated at Thanos Lake Airbase, a seemingly abandoned airbase in a middle-of-nowhere desert somewhere in California, ensuring both secrecy and safety for its researchers. Getting to the nearest town and back takes some driving time, which ultimately backfires when Mayhew finds himself getting younger as a result of Abby's serum and can't get back before he gets too young to safely drive.
• Shame If Something Happened: Monochian drops a very subtle threat to Bledsoe when he threatens to leave.
  A former colleague of yours - you remember Sandoval - she didn't like working for us either, went to work for... some people. One day, she walked into her new laboratory at her new place of employment and reached in to open her desk drawer, and boom. They had to bury what was left in a shoe box behind the reactor. A small shoebox.
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: When Mayhew is dosed with Abby's youth serum, his clothes do not change with him, and he can already be seen awkwardly hitching up his pants during a visit to a gas station... and while there, he regresses to a teenager, leaving his suit comically baggy. By the time he makes it back to WEIRD Labs, he's a child and missing his pants, leaving him wandering haplessly around the lab in a gigantic shirt.
• Slimeball: Bryan Mayhew is a politician first and a scientist second, spending most of his time oozing up to superiors and guests instead of actually doing research, to the point that he barely seems to understand the experiments going on. He doesn't even tone down the schmoozing when dealing with Abby, his lover and partner in name only, treating her in the same oily, insincere fashion as he does with everyone else, even bragging about how science is a political game and how she wouldn't have gotten anywhere without him.
• Smug Snake:
  • Dr Dylan Bledsoe is legendarily arrogant in his assumptions that he can do anything, seduce anyone, and kill anyone who gets in the way.
  • Dr Bryan Mayhew might just have the words "smug bastard" tattooed on his softly balding forehead, endlessly schmoozing and unceasingly confident that it's going to be his name on the Nobel Prize, especially when it looks as if he's managed to uncover the youth serum that Abby's been keeping hidden from him even though he only managed it thanks to a gambit on Abby's part. He's even smugger when it looks as if her attempt to test the serum on him didn't work... only to be humiliatingly disabused of this notion a few hours later.
• Stealing the Credit: Dr Bryan Mayhew is shamelessly guilty of this, having Abby do all the work and make it look as if he did all the work when visitors from other institutes visit - to the point that he even makes it look like she's his assistant in meetings with said visitors.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: The Wilson Emory Institute for Research and Development, appropriately enough, adds up to "weird," appropriate considering what's going on behind closed doors.
• The Svengali: Bryan Mayhew reportedly found Abby O'Reardon teaching biology at an obscure university and struggling to make a name for herself in the journals; after befriending her, he reportedly set himself up as a mentor/benefactor figure to her, using his connections to get her a job at W.E.I.R.D. Labs with the aim of using her as his ticket to a Nobel Prize. For good measure, he's in the habit of pointing out that it was all his hard work and political knowledge that got her as far as she has, often while belittling her own intelligence, experience, or contributions to the partnership. By the start of the story, however, Abby is getting sick of this treatment and can only occasionally be swayed by his manipulations.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Despite his betrayal of her, Patty Provost still feels sympathy for her brother, given the envy and bitterness he felt at being trapped in her shadow. At his memorial service, she asks the rest of W.E.I.R.D. Labs to find it in their hearts to forgive him.
• Tranquil Fury: Dr Monochian never loses his temper with anyone on camera, but without raising his voice or even saying anything overtly aggressive, he makes it abundantly clear that Bledloe is getting on his last nerve. For good measure, Bledsoe's threat to leave W.E.I.R.D. Labs actually makes him crack an extremely sinister smile as he replies with a threat of his own.
• Transformation Discretion Shot: After Abby doses him with her youth serum, Mayhew's rejuvenation occurs via editing or visual trickery. Beginning his regression after narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with Bob Provost, he is found to be very suddenly missing his wrinkles and arthritic joints. He stops at a gas station to call O'Reardon about this, and he looks to be back in his twenties on arrival... but as Mayhew moves between shelves, he regresses again and steps back into view as a teenager in an oversized suit. By the time he gets back to the lab, he's regressed to childhood, much to O'Reardon's amusement - especially once another cut leaves him down to about three or four years old.
• Taunting the Transformed: Dr Abby O'Reardon takes revenge on Dr Bryan Mayhew for his frequent betrayals by using him as a test subject for her prototype youth serum. After making the mistake of leaving the area in the belief that the serum didn't work, he eventually returns to the lab as a child, getting steadily younger by the minute, and clearly terrified as there's no antidote that can save him. Abby is nothing short of triumphant, mockingly babying him for a while before getting down to business.
  Awwww, I know, I know, nasty mommy. But it's gonna be okay, Bri-Bri: you see, there is an antidote that stops the process. I kinda lied about that. You know what? Under the circumstances, I think it's gonna work out just fine. You see, now I'm not gonna have to stop my research. The first thing we are going to change is this behavior: when I get done with you, young man, you are going to be kind and respectful. We are going to be the perfect little family! Mommy is going to be a very important Nobel prize winning scientist and you are going to be her happy little boy!
• Unrobotic Reveal: After Bledsoe is finished seducing Noah's assistant Diane, she accidentally cuts her arm to reveal circuitry and machine parts, prompting Bledlsoe to assume that she's another one of Noah's creations and reject her in disgust. Not long afterwards, Noah reveals that the arm was just a prosthetic he built for Diane after she lost her arm in an accident.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Bledsoe completely loses his composure on realizing that Noah is about to infect him to his own killer virus, and is reduced to pathetically begging Diane for mercy, before descending into impotent screaming as he's trapped in the biolab.
  • After crashing his car and injuring himself in a failed attempt to kill Patty, Bob throws a temper-tantrum when she throws the time machine away rather than just give it to him, spending the left few seconds furiously ranting about how Patty couldn't make anything easy for him as he limps after the machine... and he's even more enraged when he realizes that she just made him chase after her driver's license. And then he gets hit by a car.
  • Bryan Mayhew is left so terrified that he can't even speak through most of his final confrontation with Abby, and when he realizes just how thoroughly he's been outplayed, he can only whimper and cry in despair, before nodding helplessly along with Abby's demands for good behavior. This is because he's been regressed to childhood.

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