School dorks Wyatt and Gary (Ilan Mitchell-Smith and Anthony Michael Hall) are sick of being social outcasts who can’t get a girl so they digitally engineer a superwoman (Kelly LeBrock) from Einstein, Beethoven and Playboy, who takes it upon herself to force the boys out of their comfort zone.

John Hughes made his career on coming of age stories and bringing to life teen fantasies, but while the day of anarchic mayhem in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is mostly harmless fun, the psychosexual aspect of the boys’ bioengineered sex slave throws up more questions than the film is prepared to try and answer.

LeBrock described her character, Lisa (named after the Apple computer), as “Mary Poppins with breasts” (many people have pointed out that Mary Poppins almost certainly has breasts) as she arrives to help the youngsters help themselves. This approach is certainly better than if they kept her in their room chained to the bed, but it’s still creepy in both plot and production, with intimate scenes between the 15 year old boys and an adult woman.

Ironically for a film with science in the title, the science extends to the single brief scene in which Lisa is created, focusing more on the what than the how. It could have been a magic potion and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. In fact the film it’s most similar to is wacky caper The Man with Two Brains, as opposed to Hughes’s other, more grounded work.

There are good performances from the main pair as well as a young John Cusack as Wyatt’s moronic older brother and Robert Downey Jr (ironically billed as just Robert Downey) as a school bully, but with not as many laughs as it needs, it’s not up there with Hughes at his best.