Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Expected more

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Yes, it's a bad movie. The plot is rather strange if even comprehensible. The acting is a little wooden by everyone but Raul, however, can anyone honestly tell me that the direction was anything but impressive? Really, the scene construction and camera dynamics were brilliant and was not seen in movies again for some time to come. It was shot on video, from the looks of it an old Panasonic like I had when I was a kid. Yeah, they over-used chroma key stuff, but nowadays it's considered art, and this movie was avant-garde.I didn't really like this movie otherwise, but I'm giving credit where it is due, and this movies direction and general scene dynamics were definitely ahead of it's time and do not deserve to be coupled with the awfulness of the movie itself.If you are an aspiring director or screenwriter with a vision, take a look at this. If you are only out to watch the greatest movies ever made, don't bother.

Film was produced by WNET in New York, with post-production work done in Canada (it figures). In the undetermined future, Aram Fingal (the late Raul Julia-"The Addams Family," "Kiss of the Spider Woman," "The Burning Season") is a data processor for the gigantic Novicorp Corporation, who, after being caught watching a much better movie -"Casablanca" - on company time, is forced to submit to a mental rehabilitation (called "doppling" here). At the Nirvana Center (a large mall), he meets rehab programmer, Apollonia James (Linda Griffiths), who eventually becomes his tepid love interest. As he is "doppled" into the brain of a baboon (a series of stock footage with Julia's lame voice overs adds to the unintentional hilarity), a stupid kid on a tour switches his identification tag with a corpse. Why a group of unruly moppets are allowed to run free in an operating roam is never answered, by the way.Meanwhile, Fingal, with the assistance of plot holes that Dom DeLuise could fit through, creates his own fantasy world based upon the classic, Academy-Award-winning 1942 film starring himself as Rick as played by Humphrey Bogart, Griffiths as Elsa (portrayed 350 million light years better by Ingrid Bergman), and Louis Negin as a prissy and annoying Peter Lorre knock-off. The Chairman of Novicorp, "The Chairman" (Donald C. Moore) also joins in the fun as "The Fat Man," as if anyone cares. A confusing series of events is not left well enough alone as the ending clears up nothing, as the plot of "Berlin Alexanderplotz" was more coherent. And what was the point of the whole cube thing; the "I've Interfaced!" baloney, the poorly-conceived masturbation scene; as well as the spinning electron Julias, anyway? As bad as the writing and acting (Julia is twice as bad in a dual role and Griffith spends most of the time staring at a computer screen), however, it's the not-so-special effects that drop this turkey a few feet below sewer level. Ultra-cheap graphics conjure up images of Pong, Wang Computers, the video by The Buggles, and the season they videotaped episodes of "The Twilight Zone." State-of-the-art technology it's not, and today, high school kids can design better looking graphics on the Macs. These not-so special effects make the juvenile work in 1980's "Puma Man" seem like Pixar animation.Film also tries to tell us that ridiculous names such as Aram, Apollonia, Crull Spier, Emmaline Ozmondo and Geddy Arbeid, will be commonplace. An unforgivably bad motion picture on every level.

Give a 7th grader a video camera, $200,000, and some stock footage from a PBS nature film and he'd come up with this movie (on a bad day).Start with this promising premise: a lazy worker watches movies on his computer (OK, I do this myself sometimes) and is therefore punished appropriately. He's forced to possess the body of a baboon for "compulsory rehab," which will obviously make him want to be a good worker. During the baboon possession, his consciousness must be stored in cube of topaz. The strict protocols followed by the brain surgeon includes letting children wander in and out of the sterile operating room. Naturally one of the brats swaps the tag on our hero with another patient, causing his body to go to the wrong area of what appears to be a medical strip mall run by Gabe Kotter's sweat hogs. While the hero (played by Gomez Adams) is monkeying around, a red alert emergency occurs -- an elephant tries to knock the baboon out of a tree! All hands on deck! This of course leads to a situation in which his consciousness has to be put into the world's most powerful computer (it controls the weather, tells people when to go to bed, and stores old movies among other things) for safe-keeping until they find his body. So far, the movie hasn't been too weird. Sort of a cross between 1984, The Matrix, and especially Tron, minus any plot, acting, or decent music. But then the quality droops when he starts turning the real world into Casablanca by imagining himself to be in the movie. To stop him, the CEO of Novicorp (a cross between Microsoft and The Soviet Union) jumps into the computer and chases him around, threatens him, bribes him to be good, and finally decides to kill him. The tension gets too much to bear when they have the big showdown. The CEO and the hero have a 5 minute staring contest in Rick's Place. The climax comes when the hero causes a spastic virtual lava lamp to cling to the CEO, which I believe means he wins, although that is quite unclear. This is one of those movies that makes you pine for the movie police to come and pistol whip the director. Which is what Mystery Science Theater 3000 does with extreme comedic effect.

Whoof. I have now watched this movie six times, and am finally coming to terms with what little plot there actually is. Large parts of this horrible, lame PBS production make no sense at all, making you wonder if the writers were smoking something heavy while adapting this script from the short story.Basically, we have Aram Fingal(Raul Julia, from Puerto Rico, no less! Aram Fingal?) a low on the totem pole computer programmer who is so bored with his job at a huge, world spanning corporation that he spends his time watching forbidden 'cinemas'(although really just Casablanca) at work. His supervisor, annoyed at his lack of output, sends him to a 'psychist' to get mentally adjusted(as Tom Servo comments"so aging lesbian nuns rule the future?") She sends him to a place called Nirvana Village to be 'doppled'. This involves having his identity put into a glowing Borg Christmas ornament, and then being transferred into an animal's mind in their wild animal park so that he can experience life through new eyes. Not only is this a rather stupid concept, but this will cure him of his love of cinemas how? It's his boring job that was causing him to break into the cinema bus master in the first place. Being a baboon for two days isn't going to accomplish anything except to teach him how to fling his own filth at his supervisor.Something goes wrong with Fingal's dopple, and the techs(including the ridiculously named Appollonia James-I love some of the names in this movie) discover that a child on a field trip has switched the tag on Fingal's body so that it didn't go to the sleep room but somewhere else. So they have to find it, and in the meantime they dump Fingal's personality into a huge computer.Here's where the movie becomes particularly senseless. Fingal creates his own reality in the computer, spends half his time trying to reprogram it for some reason, and the rest hanging out at a bad simulation of Rick's Place from Casablanca. The Novicorp chairman, a rolled pork roast in a sweat stained white suit, follows him around in the computer threatening him because he keeps reprogramming the computer from the inside. I was never sure WHY he was doing this, as all it seemed to accomplish was making the fat guy mad. But, oh well. There's a tense moment or two at the end(I guess) where Apollonia is trying frantically to rescue Fingal's personality(that is, of course ,assuming he has one) after the cube that held it is destroyed. Fingal is put back into his newly found body, and declares that he's going to fight the system. Frankly, the system didn't seem all that Big Brother-ish, so all the hoopla over it just seemed kind of silly. But then, that was the essence of this film-silly, and confusing. PBS, you have a lot to answer for.