Overview: The Thirteenth Floor is one of the truly fun virtual reality (VR) movies out that have been produced. This movie has everything from a fun film noir settings in a VR simulation, to pure mind fuck scenes, to great VR effects. The story catches you from the beginning and picks up speed as it goes. To top it off, Thirteenth Floor is loaded with style.

The Thirteenth Floor centers on a small R&D software company (located, um, on the thirteenth floor of a large building) that has created a completely realistic similated world that has lifelike VR Sims. Corporate owner and computer scientist Hannon Fuller (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) discovers a secret so important that he’s sure someone is trying to kill him. He hides a message for his protégé, Douglas Hall (played by Craig Bierko), inside of the 1930s game simulation. After Fuller is murdered, things get truly strange. His previously unknown daughter (Gretchen Moi) comes to claim the corporation in order to shut it down, and a Detective (Dennis Heysbert) investigating the murder becomes convinced that Hall is guilty. When Hall , with the help of the lead programmer (played wonderfully by Vincent D’Onofrio), enters the “game” by taking over the consciousness of one of the game sims, he eventually learns the earth-shaking secret. Unfortunately for Hall, one of the game sims has learned it as well, and is not happy about it. At this point, the Thirteenth Floor truly takes off.

The Visuals: The Thirteenth Floor is loaded with high tech visuals in the “real” world and realistic film noir thirties visuals in the simulation. The modern visuals are sleek, with shocking neon greens, blues and reds interwoven into a dark blue-gray environment. Considering cyberpunk comes from a future-noir approach, I found the film noir add-on doubly appealing here.

The Bottom Line: The Thirteenth Floor has a terrific cast and an interesting story that really does work for the most part. While only a few characters are given real depth, the story and effects are able to carry the show. The cinematography is truly terrific, with great use of shadows and interesting lighting contrasts. On top of this, the ending provides us with a very interesting and well done mind fuck that will stay with you for a few days. All in all, thirteenth floor also has some nice cyberpunk musings concerning the nature of reality, and whether or not we would really know if it we were actually a part of some game designer’s grand simulation.

Overview: Existenz is one of the really good twist-your-brain VR game movies. ExistenZ allows us to imagine a rather strange future where games themselves potentially tear down the fabric of humanity. David Cronenberg, master of the weird, has Jennifer Jason Leigh starring as Allegra Geller, a game designer who creates VR games that are inserted directly into the spinal cord from an invasive “game pod” modification into the middle back vertebrae. Entire sets of players use living “game pods” to interact in the VR games. In this movie, Allegra is doing a “focus group test” on her latest game called eXistenZ. Everything appears fine until all hell breaks lose when one of the players gets up and tries to Kill Allegra for destroying the fabric of society.

As the movie progresses, Allegra and Ted Pikul (played by Jude Law), an unsuspecting marketeer are thrown together during the escape. While on the run, Allegra talks Ted into experiencing eXistenZ. To do this, he needs to get a game pod installed in his back. Things go from bad to worse as they attempt to get a pod from a shady guy, and significantly damage Allegra’s game pod, which has the only copy of ExistenZ anywhere on it. As the movie progresses, Cronenberg makes sure the viewer never really knows if the characters are in the very real looking game, or are actually in reality.

The Plot and Pacing: The plot is more than passable in eXistenZ, the action is good, and the acting is above average. Jude Law, Leigh, Ian Holm and Willem Dafoe are very solid and engaging in selling this story. The pacing gyrates from massively wierd head-spins to periods of calm and reflection. All in all, it’s enough to keep you captivated.

The Bottom Line: ExistenZ asks the question whether we truly know when we are in reality or not? This is interesting in that if direct VR type connections get made to the human nervous system as Kevin Warwick’s work suggests might be one day (soon) possible, this question becomes significantly more pertinent. All in all, this makes for a wonderful cyberpunk flick with some terrific scenes and interesting thoughts. With a production budget of only 15 million, the visuals are not always high tech (there are a few cool beasties though), but the story serves to aid in suspension of disbelief.

Overview: Screamers is a low budget near future outer-space movie with some cyberpunk elements in it. We get all powerful corporations and some interesting android/robot self-replicating development. While it has some serious story issues, and doesn’t always have the best acting or FX, there’s still enough here to make it pretty interesting, especially if you’re a fan of RoboCop star, Peter Weller.

The Story: Screamers takes place in a dystopic near future (2078)e environment, where mining colonies on remote planets have been at war with the N.E.B. Corporation for the past 20 years. After a new substance that made space flight possible, called Berynium, was discovered, the N.E.B. Corporation sent out mining teams to the planet “Sirus 68” to mine the Berynium, but unfortunately, it was discovered that the Berynium was accompanied by massive does of radiation. The miners and scientists on the planey Serius 68 revolted, and soon a larger alliance was formed to fight the all-powerful N.E.B. Corporation.

N.E.B. responded by dropping nuclear bombs to kill the alliance soldiers on Serius 68, and then sent in ground troops to finish the job. The alliance responded by developing “screamers.” Screamers are small sentient robots that can burrow underground at a high rate of speed, and then come up and chop humans to mincemeat. The alliance developed a self-sustaining lab that allowed the robots to self-replicate and included learning algorithms to improve their attack capability. The alliance also included an identification beacon so that the screamers would not attack alliance soldiers. Unfortunately, the screamers have begun to learn, so much so that they have started developing their own models, and worse, have started to disregard the identification beacon.

Commander Joe Hendrickson, who has been on Serius 68 since the beginning of the conflict figures out that the war has forgotten Serius 68, and has decided to try to visit the commander of the N.E.B. forces in order to make a ceasefire. Unfortunately, as he discovers in his trek, the N.E.B. forces are the least of his concerns.

The Visuals: Screamers is a cross between Alien inside visuals and a desert-like Road-Warrior setting (without the punk stuff), or perhaps better said, a Pitch Black setting. Orange is the color du jour. In general, the look and feel of the internal set designs are far less realistic than the outside world. Some of the inside sets would look right at home on a sci-fi TV series. The creatures are pretty low budget too.

The Believability Factor: Although originally based on a Philip K. Dick short story, there are enough problems with the story here that cause you to pause. In addition to some real whoppers regarding the overall plot (for instance, if humans could build adaptive learning robots, why didn’t they just get the robots to mine the radio-active Berynium?), and some serious acting issues on the part of some of the minor characters. Still, both Peter Weller (RoboCop) and Jennifer Rubin are good enough to make this worth watching. More so, the evolution of the robots, while often “magical,” is done at least well enough to make you take pause and actually have a deep thought or two about it.

The Bottom Line: I’m really torn in deciding whether to give Screamers a 5 or a 6 star rating. This is not a great movie, but there’s just enough here to make watching it worthwhile. If you’re in to dystopic futures, especially ones involving outer space, you’ll probably want to see this. If you’re in to developing AI type movies, this also should hold interest for you. In terms of “cyberpunkness,” the same thing applies – there’s just enough here to include it as watchable cyberpunk, although you’d be find just calling this a space-sci-fi movie.

Overview: In pursuit of me desire to see all cyberpunk-like films out, I was seduced into getting this flick. Terminatrix is basically the original terminator movie remade with in naked Japanese chicks. In Terminatrix’s vision of the future, an evil artificial intelligence has taken over the human race, and sex is fully regulated to stop overpopulation. But one woman, seeing the injustice in this system, rebels (This is the John Conner stand-in) and starts the resistance by convincing everyone to have massive orgies of their own free choosing. To stop this, the AI sends a hot Japanese cyborg chick - the Terminatrix, played by Japanese Exploitation Queen Kei Mizutani, back in time to have find the father of the chick who leads the orgy resistance. The Terminatrix has the ability to make people impotent by fucking them and breaking their dicks off (this also seems to kill them as well). To find our future heroine’s father, the Terminatrix doesn’t know his middle name, so, um, she goes through the phone book in order to kill the male Sarah Conner stand-in. In an attempt to stop this foul plot, the resistance is able to send a single hot naked human chick (Reece’s replacement - I must say, she looks a lot better than Reece!) is sent back to stop her and to save the father (Sarah Conner substitute). Our Reece substitute can tell who Terminatrix is by checking out her ass, so she is forced to go around lifting up all the women’s skirts!

Yes, this plot is as cheesy as they come, but let me be clear about this - Terminatrix is a frickin RIOT!!! Why, you ask? On an extremely twisted level, Terminatrix so closely follows the Terminator story that you’re continually busting out in laughter. On top of this, both the writing and production values are far above what you’d normally expect from a movie such as this. Literally, if you’re as familiar with that movie as I am, and have a soft spot for over-the-top cheesefests, you will LOVE this movie.

The terminatrix’s cyborg vision lines are a riot. When having sex (they don’t get explicit here, just frontal nudity) with her victems, the Terminatrix’s “terminator screen” messages show things like, “Not cuming fast enough” or “Whip him.”. When the Reece chick finds the future father, she says, “The future of humanity depends on your penis!” At least he has the good sense to shut the door on her. Also, if Terminatrix’s future prognostication is any guide, the future is tailor-made for male chauvinists. In this “dystopia,” a computer calls you to have sex with random chicks - but here’s the bad part - you have to lay down while they to all the work! Hmm…come to think of it, I can probably imagine worse computer-dominated future scenarios than the one that prompted the revolution.

Funniest scene Hands down, the bathroom cyborg self-repair scene is a riot! You know the one I’m talking about - where Arnold has to fix up his face and stuff? In this version, the Terminatrix has been shot six times in her primary weapon (her vagina), and has to repair it. While rolling her eyes, she forces six bullets to come out of her vagina (they don’t show this other than by the dropping of bullets), then she recharges herself by putting electricity through her nipples. To make final repairs, she fixes herself down below by sitting on a mechanical dildo! In watching this, all you can say is “My God, what a bizarre flick!”

It Matters Where you Purchase This: IMDB doesn’t even have a listing for Terminatrix, so one would think its not easy to come by. At the time of this review, you can purchase it for $27 bucks at Amazon. While funny, $27 bucks is about least $18-20 more than you would want to pay for something like this. But you’re in luck as Deepdvddiscount has it for $5.99! That’s about as large a jump as I’ve seen in available DVD prices.

The Bottom Line Again, I’m rather shocked that Terminatrix has relatively decent production values. The acting isn’t bad either, so much so that it’s like they made a serious attempt at this! I didn’t attempt the dubbing track (I almost never do), but I’m guessing it’s something to stear away from. All in all, Terminatrix is a very fun entry into the cyberpunk (facade) soft-core porn market. And while this clearly isn’t cyberpunk, it is definitely a cyberpunk parody (of the Terminator). Fair warning - this movie will make you laugh out loud - it will not get you in the “mood.”

And my apologies for the lack of screencaps. I honestly tried to take screencaps but it was a waste of time, as all the cool scenes had nudity in them.

Overview: I notice the decent IMDB rating for No Maps, but honestly, I just don’t see it. I have hard time coming up with something positive to say as No Maps for These Territories as a documentary on Gibson fails in virtually all aspects possible. You have to look long and hard to find a documentary with this little attention to detail across the board. No Maps has horrible lighting, haphazard editing and “FX” choices which detract even more from the mess that’s already on screen. In short, this film seems to be sending the message that William Gibson is a meandering scatterbrain who occasionally comes up with an interesting idea or two, but who, for reasons not of his own making, was able to become wildly popular. None of this is true of course, which is why this documentary resonates so badly with me.

Because I also gave New Rose Hotel a horrible rating, I want to be VERY clear about something – I think William Gibson is one of the most influential writers of the later part of the 20th century. His stuff is better than great. In no way does my knocking these movies reflect at all on my opinion of his literary works or his legacy. Nor do I believe that Gibson’s works cannot be very successfully transferred on-screen. Unfortunately, Gibson has yet to find his Peter Jackson.

The Setting: A significant part of my dislike for No Maps is based on the decision to use a car as the setting. In thinking about it, it’s really hard to imagine a worse way to conduct a documentary. The entire thing takes place with Mark Neale, the director, driving a car while talking to Gibson, who is in the back seat surrounded by a few of set cameras. In using this approach, Neale was able to generate the worst of all scenarios:

• Neale has to focus on driving so he has absolutely NO control over the cameras. This continually leads to horribly over or under-exposed shots of Gibson, grainy, and out of focus film and horrible positioning.
• Because Neale has to concentrate on driving, whatever skills he might have had as an interviewer are compromised by the fact that he’s in massive multitasking mode – he’s driving and continually checking the recording while attempting conducting an interview. My guess is after a while, Neale just wanted to make sure Gibson was talking, and stopped bothering listening to what was being said.
• Every now and then, Gibson would utter a terrific insight, such as when he mentioned that the internet all but ensured the end of the nation state. This would have been a great time for a prompting follow-up from an astute interviewer, but unfortunately, we get absolutely NO follow-up on this and many similar fascinating comments.

What the Cinematography Conveyed: Probably the most dissapointing aspect of No Maps relates to the unintentional visual symbols the “road trip” documentary provided. Gibson is known as a trailblazer – a thought leader in setting the course for science fiction, yet the interview in the back of the car makes him seem like someone happy to follow along someone else’s path. The title, “No Maps for These Territories ” is supposed to convey that Gibson went into un-chartered waters, yet everything in this documentary, from the meandering and repetitive music to the monotonous car ride, makes Gibson come across as someone who basically just intellectually wanders around and hopes he happens upon something interesting. In short – there was a map of the territory – it was in Gibson’s mind. This film works hard to obfuscates that fact:

• The constant penchant to splice in absolutely random images in rapid succession whenever Gibson philosophizes tends to make Gibson’s message come off as incoherent.
• The repetitive music consistenty has this meandering quality, which again, reinforces the message that Gibson wanders around through life and occaisionally gets lucky.
• The “special effects” where Neale haphazardly transferred separate drive-by the images onto the side and rear window and back side of the car so that what was coming through rear window no longer matched the side window (see image directly above for an example) served NO PURPOSE AT ALL other than to distract the viewer from Gibson’s oratory.
• The complete inattention to lighting or setting makes the entire project comparable to a neighbor’s home movie. It’s almost as if Neale was consciously trying to make Gibson (and Sterling) look as shabby as possible with the hopes that it made them more “edgy” or “real.” If this was the intent, my apologies for missing how this was helpful.

Perhaps the goal was either to break up the monotony of staring at Gibson in a back seat of a car for 88 minutes, or maybe it was done with the hope of making Gibson’s oratory seem non-linear, but what seems to be conveyed is that Gibson’s ideas aren’t really connected in any real way. In line with this, Gibson as the “meanderer” is re-enforced by poor editing decisions. While a few segments such as the internet one seem to have a nice flow, most segments are all over the non-existent map. What Neale unintentionally seems to convey is that if you keep a camera on Gibson long enough, like the rest of us, he’ll eventually come up with a a number of half-formed, off-the-cuff comments that go absolutely nowhere.

Neuromancer’s Legacy: One thing we do learn from No Maps is that Gibson, like many great innovators, is probably the worst person to talk about his place in history, and in particular, the relevance of his earlier works like Neuromancer. When it comes to discussing his legacy, Gibson is extremely modest. He’s also a perfectionist when it comes to evaluating his prose. As he gets older, he negatively judges his earlier and discounts their value and overall importance. In discussing Neuromancer, Gibson calls it a simplistic book – as simplistic as cheesy three-chord progression songs in Album Oriented Rock music in fact, and that only teenage Goths should ever find it appealing. Never mind that it won all possible scifi awards (Hugo Award, Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, Nebula Award, Seiun Award, and Ditmar Award) and defined a whole new genre of science fiction, or that it changed the vocabulary and concepts the world over (the concept of cyberspace, for instance), Gibson still considers it pretty sophomoric. This leads to the clear implication that those who see something more in Neuromancer, or any of his 80s works, are also of the intellectual caliber of teenage Goths. Yet, in his five minute interview at a cheesy restaurant (also with shitty lighting), Bruce Sterling is able to provide more context on Neuromancer’s place in history than Gibson does for the rest of the film. Sterling points out clearly that while Gibson as an older man looking back at his life may have the right to criticize himself, but this doesn’t change the fact that he was a damn good writer back then who transformed the face of science fiction – I only wish there was an interviewer in this capable of pinning Gibson down on this. While Gibson may or may not like the prose, the ideas proposed clearly had intrinsic worth, and every so often, even Gibson acknowledges this.

The Bottom Line: On the whole, this documentary performed a disservice to Gibson and his legacy. Those who have never been exposed to Gibson will watch this and conclude that Gibson was a lucky bystander in history who seemed to be at the right place at the right time. If you’re already a Gibson fan, you may get a bunch of interesting and honest tidbits from his past, but little else will be gained. In watching No Maps, I really found myself wishing that Neale had just gotten a semi-decent interviewer to sit down with Gibson in a quiet setting and interview him. Also, far more time should have been given to Gibson’s contemporaries, who clearly have a better sense of Gibson’s significants than he does. Had Neale taken this approach (one might call this a traditional documentary approach for lack of a better description), the result would have been FAR superior to the mess that this documentary produced. Again, the problem wasn’t that No Maps was produced on a shoestring budget, the problems arose from the choices made (using a moving car as the setting, where the director/interviewer/cameraman/driver was one in the same person, and the subsequent editing decisions). Yes, the name of the documentary is VERY cool, but very little else should be saved. Gibson deserves better. If history is kind, No Maps will be forgotten, and at some point, a quality documentary will be made that highlights Gibson’s most impressive legacy.

Overview: Every now and then I run across an absolutely extraordinary cyberpunk film, largely forgotten or ignored by the film going masses. More often than not, this film is foreign and never had a decent release in the US (where I’m from). One Point O (called Paranoia 1.0 in the US) is European a film that meets these criteria. Truly, you’ll be hard pressed to come close to finding an immersive film as One Point O. When you consider this was reportedly shot and produced on a budget of 1.7 Million, you begin to understand the enormity of what was accomplished here.  No, you don’t get cool explosions or guns, or fancy CG effects, but you do get an absolutely awesome near-future dystopic story with a biting commentary on advertising and software development, all wrapped up in an extremely immersive, slow paced film.  Everything is subordinated to the mood here, which is emphasized by the color choices and simple score. Unfortunately, I will need to be pretty vague in this review, as the ending definitely has a Sixth Sense type feel to it.

One Point O is about a computer programmer named  Simon who works at home in a truly dingy, run down apartment building in a very shabby part of the city. He comes home to find a package waiting inside his apartment, and gets worried as nobody should be able to get inside. He opens the package, only to find that it was an empty box. This happens again and again, each time making Simon more and more paranoid. One top of this, he is late in delivering his the code he’s been working on to his customer. It appears as if his code has become infected with a virus, and worse, he really has a craving for milk!

Every character in One Point O is quirky and memorable. Udo Kier (Ralfi from Johnny Mnemonic), one of my favorite role actors, plays an eccentric robotics hobbyist who has a nanotechnology-enabled couch that changes colors and cleans itself at the click of a button, and creates a sentient talking head in his spare time (this talking head named Alex has a penchant for making very prescient phone calls). Bruce Payne (Passenger 57, Hellborn) plays a neighbor VR game maker who creates S&M VR porn experiences by acting out the scenes with various partners. Deborah Kara Unger (Fear X) plays a cancer nurse in search of fleeting humanity wherever she can find it. Lance Henriksen (Bishop in Aliens) plays a strange, zen-like repairman who always seems to know what’s going on. Finally, Emil Hostina places a voyeuristic landlord who loves to eat meat. But its Jeremy Sisto who steals the camera - he’s simply terrific playing a normal guy overtaken by extremely weird events. 

The Visuals: Like many cyberpunk movies, One Point O is dominated by a single color scheme - in this case we get a spectrum, from a yellow to pale orange to reddish-brown, with an occasional pale green as a highlight. Pretty much the whole movie (with the exception of the white convenience store which represents the corporation) takes place in those colors. Further accenting the dystopic quality is the continually run-down feel of the place. The apartment building is continually falling apart, as is virtually everything else except for the local drug store. While its clear that advanced technologies are the norm in this world, the people in One Point O have clearly been marginalized. They play with patchwork toys and out of date technology.

The cinematography is consistently interesting in One Point O, with many using floor shots with expansive backgrounds.  However, in some cases, they probably go a bit over-board on the camera angles, such as the use of the close-up phone shot of old, which actually took attention away from the story telling.  But again, this is a minor gripe, especially when we include the editing, which for the most part, is also outstanding.  But in watching the deleted scenes, I do agree with the director’s commentary that a few shots probably should have been included, most notably the throw-up scene. 

The Message: While I can’t go into the actual plot for fear of ruining the experience, I will say that One Point O has perhaps the most biting commentary on advertising and software development you will find anywhere. There is no question who is evil in this movie, even if they are rarely seen. Renfroe and Thorsson take to extremes and then crystallize problems they see in today’s world that form the basis for the story in One Point O. But they don’t state it in an in-your-face way - far to the contrary in fact. The story itself hammers home the message in the starkest manner possible.

The Bottom Line: As long as you’re not looking for action or sleak visuals, but instead are looking for original cyberpunk themes done wonderfully well on a shoestring budget, One Point O is for you. One Point O is definitely a movie I would LOVE to talk about in detail but I cannot for fear of spoiling the terrific ending (maybe creating a spoiler thread in the meatspace would be the way to discuss it). The pacing has a slightly repetitive feel to it, but only because the movie progresses in a spiral pattern - the same basic pattern of events happen each pass, but events spin further and further out of control each time around.  But again - go buy this movie (you’ll want to watch it more than once) - you won’t be disappointed.