SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Excellent, a Must See

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Canadian TV movies from 1985 seem to be the equivalent of mind-poison. This low-budget loser has nothing to offer whatsoever, nothing of note happens for the first 27 minutes yet the film hammers home foundational exposition twice in that time. There are no scares, thrills, chills, nothing. The best I can say is it ended eventually, but even that felt about 30 minutes too late. There was a whole sub-plot just to set up a sequel that nobody could have believed would happen. A "high tech" computerized building is left on autopilot and decides it needs to eat people for their energy. They try to escape, there's standard disaster interpersonal drama, and then they try to turn it off. It's awful.Just... don't.

This is the holy grail of all Emmeritus Productions, who cranked out unbelievably cheap, silly "action" flicks for Hamilton's CHCH-TV through the 80s. It bears all the hallmarks: shot on video with soap-opera production values, silly dribs of implied sex-and-violence interspersed with lots and lots of talking. And this one comes with an attitude: the computerized office tower that sucks people's life energy through the light sockets is clearly supposed to be some kind of commentary on the tyranny of the energy-conservation movement, of all things! But now that I've voluntarily watched it three times, I have to admit that it's kind of endearing in a very stupid way: the bickering crew of mismatched fugitives-from-death are quite amusing, and the sub-HAL computer with its 80s digital-animation readout is a nice way to break things up. While I can't really award any points for being SO 80s, I am kind of obsessed with that one woman's bird-nest-forward perm. And if you're going to be bad, you might as well repeat the same walking shot three times within one five-minute stretch, for maximum entertainment value.