GHOST IN THE MACHINE
Crap on the screen!
Virtuosity in reverse. If that doesn't set off your suck alarm, nothing will.
Rachel Talalay has to be the only Freddy Krueger director who never went on to direct a really good movie (does Tank Girl count?). It wasn't a good sign that she'd directed probably the worst installment in that series, and Ghost In The Machine actually manages to be several steps worse.
Watch out, Cleveland; there's some nasty guy out there called The Address Book Killer, who'll steal your address book, kill every single family in there, just after killing you, or just before. That's a LOT of murders, and with a gimmick like that, why is the press taking so long in making him a household name? Never mind. He's nabbed the address book of a local widow (Karen Allen), and on his way to "return it to her" (bwa ha ha) he wipes out and is terminally injured. He's taken to the hospital, slipped into this CAT-scan machine, or MRI thing, or whatever the hell it is, and there's a power surge, and next thing you know, his soul is zapped up onto the internet to become a computer virus so he can manipulate hair dryers and microwaves. Ooh, look out, the dishwasher's coming to get you!
About half of this movie's suckitude is courtesy of its dopey script, which for example, doesn't know the difference between email and IRC, but I suppose this kind of understanding of computers is rather beside the point in a movie where this computer virus actually takes physical form at the end. For that matter, there's one scene here where a microwave manages to cook the entire room it's in within about thirty seconds. And how did this killer stay uncaught for so long when he makes a habit of driving on the wrong side of the road to get to his victims?
There's more crap to spit out here, like when the killer stalks this obnoxious kid in a virtual-reality shooter game (oh no, the video game's run amok!). There's even a hand-in-the-garborator scene, which as I've said time and time again, is a letdown no matter how it turns out. Bottom line is, this is a stupidly written movie that could have used another hundred or so rewrites and then maybe, MAYBE it would've been ready for production.
The other half of what makes this so bad is that obnoxious kid. Imagine a fourteen-year-old Fred Durst who actually uses the "Was your daddy a thief?" line on chicks, and uses "clever" ploys to con gullible people out of their money. Played by Wil Horneff, you could count on two hands the number of seconds it takes since his first appearance before you want him to die horribly.
Karen Allen does her best, and it isn't her fault that I can't see her as anything but Marian in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Chris Mulkey is here, playing a bit against type and that's nice, though it does give us an idea of why he's usually cast as a heavy.
There are precisely three things I liked about this movie. First, was our introduction to the killer, which was creepy and bloody and nasty, just like it should be. Second was the guy's car accident (however stupidly arrived at), which showed me something I'd never seen before: a car sliding on its roof through a graveyard, from the driver's point of view. Pretty neat. And third, how Talalay shows us a Tron-like, imaginative (if fantastical) look at the inner workings of the computers.
Not that any of this can save this movie, I'm warnin' you now, so if you're gonna see this against my advice, get ready to wish you hadn't. Also known as Deadly Terror (ooh, great title), so avoid that one too.
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