It’s markedly less wacky than its peers, and quite a lot more spooky. It’s arguably the most influential film on the list – you could draw a straight line from this to most of the other entries here – but its charm cannot cover for the fact that it has dated quite badly. This is the first version of Freaky Friday the one where Jodie Foster swaps places with Barbara Harris. But no, this is the film where he urinates into a fountain at the same time as Ryan Reynolds and then becomes Ryan Reynolds. As such, it’s easy to mix this up with the film where he accidentally gets Jennifer Aniston pregnant, or the film where Melissa McCarthy tries to steal his identity, or either of the two films where he tries to murder his employer. The Change-Up is from Jason Bateman’s post-Arrested Development money-grab period, where he appeared in 18 movies in a five-year period. Look past that avalanche of period signifiers, though, and you are left with a sweet enough film about a girl who went to bed aged 13 and woke up as pre-Affleck Jennifer Garner. Everybody uniformly looks like they had their eyebrows blasted off in a gas explosion. There is a joke about how “Eminem” sounds like “M&Ms”. Mark Ruffalo plays an anodyne love interest. 13 Going on 30 (2004)Īrguably the most 2004 movie ever made. This is a real film that actually exists. In this movie, Tim Allen gets bitten on the hand by a sacred dog that Robert Downey Jr stole from Tibet, and then he turns into a dog, at which point he makes friends with a snake who is also a dog. Once again, unless there is a parallel movie about a happy-go-lucky dog that keeps being plunged into the waking nightmare of becoming Tim Allen, The Shaggy Dog has to count as a body-switch comedy. In truth, this film can be surprisingly touching, but only if you go into it drunk with all of your expectations in the toilet. Petty criminal Rob Schneider and entitled brat Rachel McAdams swap places, in a film that allows Rob Schneider to expand his repertoire by playing Rob Schneider, but with a slightly higher voice. ![]() It is a very bad film but, you will notice, still ranks several places higher than the 2016 Kevin Spacey cat-based body-switch movie Nine Lives. Alison’s Birthday (1981)Īnother genre outlier, Alison’s Birthday is an Australian horror movie where nothing happens for long stretches of time, and then a 16-year-old girl gets forcibly inserted into the body of a 104-year-old woman. The man is now married to Alec Baldwin Meg Ryan now has cancer. However, in 1992, it also lent itself to Prelude to a Kiss, a syrupy romance where an old man swaps bodies with Meg Ryan after kissing her on her wedding day. The body-swap trope is so unquestionably stupid that it usually lends itself best to comedy. I haven’t heard the song this film is based on, but I would imagine it must be quite something. Meanwhile, his soul is transplanted into the body of 18-year-old Charlie Schlatter a boy who has to save the family business, seduce a schoolgirl with his extensive knowledge of Harry S Truman and stop Burns’ gold-digger wife from pulling the plug on his comatose body. And yet for some reason, Burns spends most of the film in a coma. ![]() 18 Again! (1988)Īnother film from the endless tranche of 1980s body-swap comedies, 18 Again! is a movie starring George Burns that is in part based on a song he had recorded eight years earlier. Which is an extraordinarily complicated premise for a film that primarily exists to allow Corey Feldman to dance like Michael Jackson at any opportunity. Robards can only visit the real Feldman – plus his wife for some reason – in his dreams. ![]() Like Father Like Son (1987)ĭuring an improbable meditation-based bicycle accident, the soul of elderly professor Jason Robards enters the body of excruciating teenage Michael Jackson impersonator Corey Feldman. Anyway, in this film a voodoo princess accidentally teaches some children how to swap their parents’ bodies around. Actual Peter Bogdanovich, responsible for Paper Moon and The Last Picture Show. However, I will include it on the basis that it was directed by Peter Bogdanovich. A Saintly Switch (1999)Īgain, I was in two minds whether or not to include this, on the basis that it’s a made-for-TV film that never received any form of theatrical opening. This list primarily consists of body-swap films, but nevertheless I am including Kevin Spacey’s 2016 cat-based body-switch movie Nine Lives because I want to remind people that it is in the top five worst films ever made. A body-switch film, meanwhile, is a film where a human’s soul is transported into a new vessel without reciprocation. A body-swap film is a film in which two people trade bodies, to surprising and sometimes hilarious effect. Before we begin, we need to make the distinction between body-swap films and body-switch films.
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