There's an intriguing premise buried in MEMORY ... [but] he execution leaves something to be desired.
Memory (2007)
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Reviews Counted:13
Fresh:1
Rotten:12
Average Rating:3.7/10
Theatrical Release:Mar 23, 2007 Limited
Synopsis: "Memory (mem-(o)-re)" Your name is Dr. Taylor Briggs (Billy Zane). In your mid 30’s, you are a medical researcher and the world’s leading medical authority on diseases that affect long term memory... "Memory (mem-(o)-re)" Your name is Dr. Taylor Briggs (Billy Zane). In your mid 30’s, you are a medical researcher and the world’s leading medical authority on diseases that affect long term memory function. While delivering a guest lecture in Brazil, you’re asked to consult on a medical anomaly: a strange man found half dead at the very headwaters of the Amazon. An MRI of the patient’s brain indicates massive tumors in all the areas of his brain storing long term memory. Stunned by these results, you examine the patient’s personal effects and get a strange powder under your fingernails, but can make no sense of what’s causing the affliction. Haunted by what you’ve seen, you return to your high-rise hotel room. Suddenly, the building is wracked by tremors and a tidal wave of water blows through your door, flooding the hotel room with water surging to the ceiling. Drowning, you punch a hole in the ceiling tiles and swim towards a bright, blinding light. You surface, gasping at air, shocked to find yourself treading water in the middle of a pristine mountain lake surrounded by tall pine trees and distant mountain peaks. Unsure if you’re dead or just dreaming, you swim to the shore and spot a figure in a Black Burberry overcoat racing through the woods. You try to follow the person, but trip and find yourself back in your hotel room. It’s morning. You’ve been out for twelve hours. Late for your flight, you notice red splotches on the fingers of your right hand. You suspect you’ve gotten some of the powder from the hospital under your fingernails. Returning to the hospital, you find the patient dead, his room scrubbed clean, his body already cremated. You’re in the hallway wondering what to do when you spy the backpack in a janitor’s garbage cart. You take the backpack and race for your flight. Returning back to Boston, you easily slide back into your normal life, but still cannot escape the memory of that haunting figure at the lake. You return to your medical work, centering around Alzheimer’s Syndrome. We discover that your mother was struck down by Early Onset Alzheimer’s Syndrome which hit her in her mid 40’s. There is a fifty percent chance you’ve inherited the disease too. So you’re a solitary figure, working feverishly for a cure. But the vision still haunts you when you discover a painting in a swap shop gallery of a figure so eerily similar to the one in your visions. As you struggle to explain what you saw in Brazil, you discover that the patient you consulted on was a geneticist studying a long forgotten ceremony practiced by remote Indians: a ceremony that ancient man and his ancestors might have also practiced for almost two millions of years in our prehistory, a ceremony that allowed people to access memories of their parents’ lives prior to their own birth. You realize that by accidentally ingesting a tiny amount of the strange powder, you might be accessing memories of your own ancestors. But what you’re seeing are the abductions of innocent people. Abductions that occurred a few years before you were even born. Nefarious crimes perhaps committed by the father you never knew. . . The father who supposedly died before you were born. Old family secrets are hard to unravel since your Mother can tell you nothing now. And as the truth reveals itself, you will find yourself drawn into the nightmarish world of this shadowy predator. And the stakes are greater than you could ever imagine. Time is running out and you’re the only one with the memories to stop it. -- © Echo Bridge Entertainment [More]
Starring: Billy Zane, Ann Margret, Dennis Hopper, Tricia Helfer
Starring: Billy Zane, Ann Margret, Dennis Hopper, Tricia Helfer, Terry Chen
Director: Bennett Davlin
Director: Bennett Davlin
Screenwriter: Bennett Davlin, Anthony Badalucco
Producer: Anthony Badalucco, Jesse Newhouse
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Reviews for Memory
Considerably better -- and far more intriguing -- than most entry-level horror pics, marrying a retro B-movie setup with the ghostly obsessions of recent Asian extreme cinema.
The fact that it raises worthy questions concerning experience and recollection, as well as cultural, legal, and political definitions of self with regard to memories%u2014well, that's sort of too bad. They're lost amid forgettable plotty detritus.
The movie draws upon so many influences -- stylized Hitchcock suspense, surreal Asian horror and the Gothic romance of Britain's Hammer Studios -- it's easier to follow the reference points than the plot.
Stylish and twisty, but not clever enough to support its more outrageous plot machinations.
Filled with labored exposition, stilted line readings and the most unconvincing romantic hookup since Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley.
A bizarre, mind-bending psychological thriller, filled with red herrings.
To what niche does this movie aspire, Michael Crichton sci-fi chiller, Ed Wood camp or neo-'60s grand guignol for former leading ladies of a certain age? You decide.
Adapting his own novel, [director] Davlin seems blessedly unaware of how silly his story is, attacking it with such escalating melodramatic fervor that Memory rises from the disastrously campy to the bizarrely hypnotic.
... tosses us so many hints and red herrings that, by the end, we really don't care who turns out to be the killer. All solutions are equally satisfying, which is the same thing as being equally unsatisfying.
The director states in the film's press notes that 'all the science you will see in this motion picture is cutting edge,' a statement that holds true if you simply replace the word 'science' with 'silliness.'
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