An accident at a laboratory renders stock analyst Nick Holloway (Chevy Chase) invisible.  CIA agent David Jenkins (Sam Neill) wants to recruit Nick to be an assassin but Nick doesn’t want to kill people.  He just wants to make his date with Alice (Daryl Hannah).  With Jenkins and his agents in pursuit, Nick flees to a beach house belonging to his friend George (Michael McKean) and tries to figure out what to do with his life now that no one can see him.  Fortunately, Alice is staying at the beach house too.  Nick and Alice fall in love but Jenkins is close behind.

Based on a science fiction novel by H.F. Saint, Memoirs of an Invisible Man started out as a vanity project for Chevy Chase, who felt that the film’s mix of comedy and drama would establish him as a serious actor.  The project went through a series of directors, including Ivan Reitman and Richard Donner, but in the end no one wanted to work with the special effects necessary to create the impression of invisibility and, even more importantly, no one wanted to work with Chase.  When the film was finally offered to John Carpenter, he was reluctant to do another studio film because of his bad experience with They Live.  He finally agreed because it had been four years since his last film.

The special effects in Memoirs of an Invisible Man are still impressive and the chase scenes show off Carpenter’s abilities as an action director.  The movie flopped with critics and audiences but that was not Carpenter’s fault.  Carpenter keeps the story moving and gets good performances out of Sam Neill and even Daryl Hannah.  The problem with the movie is that Chevy Chase is miscast as an action hero and he tries too hard to give a serious performance.  Carpenter later said he wanted to add more comedy to the film and to emphasize Chase’s talent for physical comedy but Chase refused to do so.  Chase also resented wearing the blue bodysuit that would be used to render him invisible onscreen and often removed the suit early, ruining whatever else Carpenter had planned to shoot during the day.  You can add John Carpenter to the long list of directors who have said they will never work with Chevy Chase again.

One good thing did come out of Memoirs of an Invisible Man.  Carpenter met and enjoyed working with Sam Neill.  (Memoirs of an Invisible Man probably would have worked better in Neill and Chase had switched roles.)  Neill would go on to star in Carpenter’s next film, In The Mouth of Madness.