But to call Real Genius just another frat rat film is like saying The Exorcist (1973) is merely another religious epic. This is more like The Mad Scientist’s Club Goes to College. But rather than something like Revenge of the Nerds (1984), which merely centered around various gags laughing at nerds getting comeuppance, this comes with considerable ingenuity. For one the geeks are portrayed as the heroes of the show, not the butts of pranks. The film is not about laughing at geeks, but it is geek humour that comes from geeks and is written to other geeks. Few other films of this genre conduct their hijinks such sheer invention – the use of coin-sized slices of frozen nitrogen to defraud slot machines; the tightass brown-nose of the show being implanted with a dental radio transceiver and then fooled with voices claiming to be God; and a climax that involves a house being blown apart with popcorn cooked by orbital laser. The great surprise is that Real Genius is so entertainingly subversive and gratifying – it quite enjoyably does all the lowbrow hijinks without pandering its hi-tech literacy down to audiences. It even evinces a sweetness to the romance between Jarrett and Michelle Meyrink as the hyper-kinetic Jordan.

Val Kilmer in only his second film performance gives an anarchic high-charisma performance – he’s sort of like a zapped-up and sexier Bill Murray. He embodies a real charisma and anti-authoritarianism and compared to the mostly wooden performances he gives elsewhere, he’s rarely had such charm. William Atherton plays another of his double-dealing, tightass bureaucrats and has never seemed more wonderfully loathsome.

Martha Coolidge went onto a sporadic directing career after this, mostly in tv with occasional cinematic forays such as the well-received Rambling Rose (1991), Lost in Yonkers (1993), Angie (1994), Out to Sea (1997) and The Prince and Me (2004), as well as one other genre entry, the interesting fantasy film Three Wishes (1995).