Mindwarp (1992)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

Most of the movies I watch, I find through advertisements or coming attractions.  Some, I find while wandering through a store looking at multi-movie packs.  Occasionally, I’ll look through Netflix for movies to watch and review.  I think I found Mindwarp while looking for Bruce Campbell movies.  I had never heard of the movie before and for good reason.

The movie takes place in 2037.  As you might expect from a post-apocalyptic movie, the ozone has been depleted, the Earth’s surface is uninhabitable and humanity is split up into two groups:  Those that live in a biodome hooked up to a virtual reality and those that live outside the biodome, either as a mutant or trying to avoid the mutants.  Judy lives in a biodome, sharing a room with her mother.  She spends most of her time in the VR system, disconnecting to eat and (presumably) perform other necessary biological functions.  She can experience anything she wants, which gets old.  She realizes it’s all fake and longs for something real.

When she accidentally kills her mother, she’s kicked out of paradise and sent to live outside.  She’s nearly attacked by some mutants, but is saved by Stover.  (Stover is played by Bruce Campbell.)  Mutants are unintelligent.  They can’t speak and spend most of their time mining what used to be landfills.  Stover is one of a handful of people left that are still what we would think of as human.  Eventually, both are captured by mutants.  Stover is put to work in the mines while Judy is taken to be sacrificed, but is saved by the Seer.

The Seer’s girlfriend, Cornelia, doesn’t like Judy, mostly because The Seer seems to have a special affection for Judy.  Cornelia tries to infect Judy with these mutant parasite leeches, which the Seer stops.  (If you’re at all squeamish, you don’t want to know what The Seer does as punishment.)  Meanwhile, Stover attempts to escape with Judy, which fails.  The seer puts Stover in a semi-submerged cage, causing him to become infected with several leeches, which is not good for Stover.

It’s also revealed that The Seer is Judy’s father, which isn’t so bad until he reveals that he wants them to have lots of normal little children to lead the mutants.  Another escape attempt is made with similar results.  This time, Judy manages to take find a more permanent solution to her problem.  (Again, those that are squeamish probably won’t want to know the details.)

I’m not going to give away the ending in case your stomach has the fortitude to make it through the entire movie.  However, I think it should be obvious by now that this is not a movie for children.  I think anyone younger than 10 will get nightmares.  Imagine if you took elements from The Matrix and the original Total Recall and tried to make it in the style of Mad Max.  You would end up with something roughly like this.

It’s the kind of movie that you can enjoy if you don’t expect too much.  I had wanted to watch it mostly to see Bruce Campbell in something other than Burn Notice.  Had I not been able to get this streaming, I probably would have held off, though.  There’s a low-budget look to the movie, partly in film quality and partly in the set design.  It was made in 1992, but it looks like something out of the ‘80s.  Also, the biodome sets look kind of generic and basic, which may be the point.  I don’t think that they quite pulled it off, though.  It’s kind of hard to do in this movie without looking like they couldn’t afford anything better.

If you have Netflix and are able to stream movies or you can get this on demand, I’d say give it a try.  It is different and isn’t the worst movie I’ve seen.  However, I wouldn’t recommend getting it on DVD or paying for it on demand.  At least I got a review out of it. 

IMDb page

Assault Girls/Asaruto gâruzu (2009)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

I’ve come to realize that the first-review promotions on Epinions probably wasn’t done with movies in mind.  Many of the mainstream, big-budget titles were typically reviewed regardless.  This left many of the independent and low-budget movies, some of which are good.  However, the vast majority of movies without reviews were going to be movies that are pretty crappy.  Most of them were without reviews for a reason.

Take Assault Girls.  I’ll admit that I gave into my more basic instincts when I saw that it was about three Asian women in a VR setting.  What I didn’t realize is that at 70 minutes, there was no way it was going to be that good.  Ever notice how a three-hour movie can be long, but a one-hour movie will seem even longer?  This is the case here.  The movie starts with an 8-minute narration about shared reality and the decline of man or something.  (I couldn’t really tell because the audio was kind of muffled.)

We then cut to three women and a guy in some sort of fight with giant worm things.  One woman is a Goth that can turn into a raven and shoot energy balls.  Another is dressed in red and rides a horse.  The third is dressed in black and grey and has an airplane.  They guy has some sort of RPG launcher or something.  They’re all doing this to get points or something, all the while insulting each other’s motivations for being there.

Each of them runs out of some critical item, like grenades or transport time, and has to wait until they can get more.  They go back to their respective bases and then proceed to wander aimlessly in the vast desert that is their VR world.  Along the way, they meet a snail and a statue.  (What do they do?  Put the snail on the statue, of course.)  There’s also some sort of voice that tells them stuff, like how beating the big boss worm is impossible to do alone, so they’ll have to form a party.

Actually, I’m not sure if the voice was telling the pilot woman or all of them.  Either way, this takes up about a half an hour.  Yes.  We’re talking about a good 20-30 minutes of walking around in the desert.  Not a figurative 30 minutes, but a real 30 minutes, much like how I’m using a great many words to describe this.  I actually sat through the entire thing.

After everyone’s gotten some good VR exercise, pilot woman gathers everyone so that she can propose teaming up and defeating the boss worm, Madara, together and splitting the points four ways.  The guy doesn’t like this, so he proposes taking half and leaving the rest for the women to split.  She challenges him to a four-round duel.  He accepts and subsequently loses all four rounds.  So, they team up and beat the boss worm.  They guy then realizes that he’s been betrayed, so he shoots down the women and decides that he’s going to be a player hater from here on out.  That’s how the movie ends.

I’m going to say it right here: Do not buy this movie.  There is going to be little to no replay value.  Remember how I said that a one-hour movie could be longer than a three-hour movie?  Whoever edited this movie should have gotten rid of all the walking scenes.  I don’t think this would have taken anything away from the movie.  From there, we probably could have cut the movie in half again and not lost much.

When I finished the movie, I felt like I was missing some sort of perspective, like it was one big in-joke and I didn’t get the punch line.  I did some research and apparently, it borrows elements from a movie called Avalon.  (IMDb doesn’t list this as a sequel or anything.   It just says, “Evolves around the same virtual reality:  Avalon”.)  If I had watched Avalon, I’m wondering if Assault Girls would have made sense.  It also probably doesn’t help that I’m not a gamer.  It’s possible that the four characters are supposed to make fun of those that play a lot.

Instead of all of this walking, we could have had a little character development.  Why is everyone there?  We get that everyone’s being paid to be there, but how are they being paid?  Is it by the week?  Is it by the kill?  Is it by the point?  At least one person is doing this to support a family.  Is the family being paid directly?  How long do they stay there?  Is it for a set period of time or until they beat the game?  It’s also never stated why someone would pay them.  Is it to test the system?  Is it to study combat with an alien race?  At least some of this could have been explained during all of those walking scenes.

The movie is kind of  like The Matrix meets Dune.  (This isn’t entirely fair.  At least The Matrix had a coherent plot.)  This is the worst case of What the F*** was Everyone Thinking that I’ve ever seen.  There was this rule that everyone had to speak English while in the system, even though an exception is made in one scene.  This isn’t to say that subtitles aren’t necessary.  As I said, the introductory monologue was hard to understand and Netflix didn’t seem to have subtitles while streaming.  There were subtitles when the producers thought necessary, but I had trouble in  spots.  There are also five chapters, each of which has lines about gods being hidden and men that can’t be forgotten.  The text was not in English, but the subtitles were there to help.

It’s kind of like someone tried to take a short story and make it into a full-length movie.  As you might expect with a 70-minute film, they fell way short of this.  Instead of adding material, they had people walk around.  I’d recommend avoiding this one, even if you can get it streaming.

IMDb page

Trailer

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

Note:  This review is reposted from Epinions.

Some questions are hard to answer. What is reality? What is life? Why are we here? When a company creates a virtual reality, people have to start asking these questions. They create a rendition of the 1930s that’s a little off in terms of the colors, but otherwise seems real. There are seemingly real people who sleep in seemingly real beds and eat seemingly real food. A user can connect and take the identities of one of the characters.

Hannon Fuller, the man who created the system, figures out something incredibly disturbing. It’s so disturbing that he has to leave a note for Douglas Hall, one of his employees, in the system. The problem is that Hall is suspected of Fuller’s death. There’s a period of a couple of hours that he can’t remember, which puts doubt in his mind.

So, he goes into the system to find the note. Thing is that the guy he gave it to isn’t telling. He also finds out that Fuller had a daughter and that the daughter is here to shut down the project, as per Fuller’s wishes. Thing is that no one knew that Fuller had a daughter or that he wanted to shut down the project. After all the hard work that they put into it, why shut it down?

There are a lot of implications for a machine like that. There are some positives, like using it for training. Tweak the physics a little and you give police a chance to train in situations without risking death. You could also have virtual vacations if you perfected it. You would also have your own virtual playground, which could be a good or bad thing, depending on the user. (Imagine a virtual-reality Grand Theft Auto or interactive adult films.)

It does bring up the question of ‘being’ someone else. In the movie, the people generally assume the identities of people that look like them. However, you could put someone in the body of someone different. Someone could find out what it’s like to be bound to a wheelchair or what it’s like to be a minority. Those questions aren’t really dealt with in the movie. It's primarily a murder mystery. Did Hall really do it? If not, who did? You even get a twist midway through the movie.

Reality isn’t always what it seems. It’s also not all that it’s cracked up to be. The characters in the program go about their lives not knowing that they’re in a simulation. However, when one finds out, they begin to question what reality is. I have to give the movie credit for taking something that other books and movies have done and exploring it a little more. The movie gets four stars.

IMDb page