This movie is a missed opportunity. The cast was there. The idea was there. Ultimately the lack of a competent director killed this movie before it could even get going. It's a shame too if you ask me because the window for a movie like this to make an impact was short indeed.It goes like this. In the future our
lives suck. To make up for the major suckage we opt to while away the hours at a facility called the Resort. This Resort feeds us a government alloted portion of mind candy which we use to cope with the sterile shadow that our lives have become. How does it work? Lets just say the Matrix ripped off some ideas from this movie. A three pronged plug is connected at the base of the spinal cord to a system which tricks our subconscious into seeing whatever the program wants us to see. The immediate applications for such a technology are quickly addressed in a fun tour through the facility. The most popular programs are Safari, Afterlife, Judgement Day, and Candy. In Safari you get to shoot animals that no longer exist in the face! In Afterlife you can visit people you know who died or just look them up to settle an old score. Judgement Day is exactly what it sounds like, you get to play judge, jury, and executioner. Then there's the obvious application, Candy, which is a one size fits all erotic fantasy program. Of course the real goal of the Resort is to make people so hopelessly addicted to their fantasy lives that they have to keep coming back. They really don't spend any time on trying to develop things that will actually help people. That is where our hero comes in; none other than BRUCE CAMPBELL himself. He heads up a resistance movement that is determined to rid us of this tyrannical mind jobbery once and for all! With the help a beautiful psychologist ... wait uh ... wrong movie. With the help of ... some lady ... he gets himself shot in the STO MATCH while "hacking ze mainframes." He then shows up at Menno's (YES THAT IS HIS NAME) facilitator booth and demands that Menno help him download his mind into onto a disc. (I noticed that they made this "high density" disc using an 80mm fan and two Sony mini-discs) Things go wrong for Menno (played by Bill Campbell, Bruce's second cousin) when all of a sudden he has the most wanted man around lying dead in his booth at work. Shoot damn. So he's brought in for "questioning." Convinced he's an idiot they take away his badge and tell him to go home. But for Menno, his strange adventure is just beginning. The rest of the movie is a tale about Menno and the resistance vs. corruption and The Man. Do they win? Did you really just ask that question?This movie should've been awesome. It's about Virtual Reality that you plug into your mind just like the Matrix. It shows a dude who is sentenced to three consecutive virtual executions! It also has Michael Dorn, Robert Picardo and Bill Erwin (OMG he's 96 now!). Where did they go wrong? All over the place.1. The pacing of this movie awful.2. The effects make Superhuman Samurai Cyber Squad look good.3. The main character, Menno, comes across as an ignorant, bumbling, pacifist that seems to be incapable of thinking for himself.4. The movie has no flow or cohesion to the scenes. They all just blur together. It feels like there wasn't any particular goal they had in mind when trying to edit this.What could they have done to make this movie great?1. Make Michael Dorn's character like Worf minus the forehead ridges.2. MAKE BRUCE CAMPBELL THE MAIN CHARACTER! 3. Hire a real director.4. Explain how virtual executions actually kill you.5. Throw more than $500 at the special effects.6. Make the villain's motivation about something other than winning an election.7. Explain how the world became the way it is.8. Take out all of the BS computer jargon.9. Make the fight scenes believable.10. Pay a composer to make a real soundtrack.If they had done these things trust me, you would've heard of this movie before. Instead this movie suffers a fate worse than death by living on as the Jean Luc Picard who never fought the Nausicaan raider.Here are my favorite quotes from Menno's Mind.Bill Erwin - "And by then you're in a fancy computer palace begging for a piece of your past that you threw away."Menno - "Oh so that's what that disc was for. It uploaded his brain into the system."Menno - "Wait, what if we use a worm to get inside and then initiate a Mega virus?"Dorn - "What program has that kind of power?"Menno - "No program. We'll use Dourif's brain."Menno - "I've got to run an anti-virus program on my brain. That ought to dump all non-resident data including Dourif's mind back into the computer."These are a few of the things to seek out while experiencing Menno's Mind.1. Falling patch cables.2. A lady being strangled by a patch cable.3. Monitors that are made of cardboard which go flying when you hit them at full speed.4. Bruce Campbell hacking.5. The HIGH DENSITY disc of the future.6. Henchmen who couldn't hit a walrus with a paintball gun from 3 feet away.7. Umpteen billion generic sound effects. Including the same door opening and closing sound effect used in every scene.If I'm so disappointed in this movie why did I give it 1.5 stars? Simply put, the last scene is so face palm inducing and hilariously bad that I couldn't help myself. I just sat there pointing and laughing for a good 3 minutes or so.Should you watch this movie? Do you like train wrecks? Do you like Bruce Campbell? If you answered yes to any of these questions then by all means be my guest. Elsewise I suggest you look for actual entertainment in places which peddle known commodities. e.g. Stores.A brief side note. The fact that there is a game called Afterlife in this movie makes me hate Carver's Gate even more because I now know they ripped that off too! BASTARDS!
May 31, 2010
