THE SENDER
As in, "Return To..."?

  It's hard for me to get excited over a general theme I've seen completely mined out over the past fifteen years, and while The Sender deserves credit for preceding just about all of them, I just can't bring myself to care unless something really special is done with it all.

Zeljko Ivanek (who today plays the scummy governor on "Oz") plays a young man who, for reasons unknown, wakes up on the side of the road, walks to the nearest public beach, fills up his jacket with rocks and proceeds to walk out into the lake.  Interesting means of attempting suicide there, I don't think I've ever seen that before.  He's fished out and sent to the local mental institution, where lacking any identification he's given the name "John Doe 83".  He tells his doctor (Kathryn Harrold) that he has no father (and thankfully, the "Yeah, just like Jesus!" is brought up and dismissed early on before it can be passed off as something clever), and soon, that doctor is hallucination all over the place.  And then come the dinosaurs.  (okay, I'm just kidding about the dinosaurs)

I guess you could say this is a progenitor of those rubber-reality movies which we saw so much of in the late 80's and early 90's.  This movie must've seemed a lot fresher at the time, but viewing it today it's pretty easy to score well while playing spot-the-hallucination.  Still, the hallucinations themselves are pretty cool, like one where rats keep crawling out of 83's mouth, or my favorite, where bathroom mirrors crack and bleed.  We've seen a lot of walls bleed in the movies, but this bleeding-mirror scene won me over completely, even though watching it, I knew those mirrors weren't really bleeding.

Despite a great score by Trevor Jones and nicely drained-of-all-hope Halloween-esque cinematography, The Sender is cold and distant to the point of feeling utterly passionless.  Good ideas it's got, it just needs a more gut-oriented execution.  There are scenes which come close to that sort of impact, (and that bleeding-mirror scene is a killer) but the easy understanding of what's really going on hampers it; I know, it wasn't a beaten-into-the-ground cliché when it came out.  I don't really care.

There ain't a lot more for me to say here; if you're really curious about that head coming off on the back of the box, by all means, give it a look. (even though just whose head it is becomes quite apparent long before the event itself, though it'd be mean of me to spoil whether it's a hallucination or not)  Chances are, you're not that curious.

Directed by Roger Christian, who I suspect is (right or wrong) about to join Joel Schumacher among the most hated directors in Hollywood for helming Battlefield Earth.

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