SUPERBABIES: BABY GENIUSES 2

[] (One star)

What were they thinking? Running time: 85 minutes. Rated PG (action violence, rude humor). At the E-Walk, the Union Square, the Loews 84th Street, others.

‘SUPERBABIES: Baby Geniuses 2″ is spectacularly awful, way worse than you’d expect from a supposed family film being dumped into Hollywood’s version of the Bermuda Triangle: a late-August release by a studio (Columbia) resorting to an alias (Triumph).

“Superbabies” is the sort of incoherent mess that invariably goes straight to video. It’s less a sequel to the mercifully forgotten “Superbabies” than a lame attempt to clone “Spy Kids.”

The focus this time is not on the tiresome talking toddlers (played by four pairs of twins) but on Kahuna (played by triplets Leo, Myles and Gerry Fitzgerald), who is basically an eightysomething superhero in a 7-year-old’s body.

Right after World War I in Germany, Kahuna accidentally ingested his American scientist father’s secret formula, which gave him superpowers but permanently arrested his physical, and presumably mental, development.

Kahuna ended up in a Berlin orphanage, while his brother, Cane – Oscar-winner Jon Voight, sporting bad wigs and a worse accent in a new career low – apparently became a Nazi, though his first appearance as an adult, for some reason, is set in 1962 Berlin.

Most of “Superbabies” takes place in present-day Southern California, where Cane – who’s now known as Biscane – is plotting to take over the world by inserting subliminal messages in TV broadcasts.

But Biscane has to deal with Kahuna, as well as those talking babies at an orphanage, who develop some superpowers of their own at Kahuna’s eyeball-gougingly ugly lair behind the Hollywood sign.

Directed by veteran Bob Clark, who helmed the original – as well as “A Christmas Story” and the “Porky’s” trilogy – this sequel features cheesy special effects and jaw-droppingly bad performances by, among others, Scott Baio.

The kids at a screening of “Superbabies” seemed as baffled as the adults by what was supposed to be going on – especially when President Bush and Whoopi Goldberg turned up for brief cameos.