Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

I realize this is a bad movie. But I like it. It's incomprehensible, features some rather insulting Casablanca references (as the MST3K cast said, never put a good movie in your bad movie), and frankly it's astonishing that it contained so many good actors. (Really! Raul Julia stars, and there are also a lot of very talented character actors who basically sleepwalk through their parts in this movie. Goodness knows how they were talked into doing it.)

The direction is practically nonexistent. I'm convinced the actors are making up the blocking on their own. The cinematography is terrible, except in the stock footage of African wildlife used for Fingel's dopple. And the whole thing reeks of the kind of "social commentary" fiction I used to write when I was in ninth grade. (Wretched stuff, really.) MST3K really is the best venue for this film, even if the fat jokes got a bit old.

Nevertheless, I have a soft spot in my heart for this movie. When I was little, this movie was shown on the local PBS station. I must've been nine or ten, and for years I only remembered tiny snippets -- a glowing cube, somebody going into a computer and making it snow indoors, and, of course, my first introduction to "Casablanca." My brother, who couldn't have been more than 7, was my only corroboration for having seen this movie because he remembered it too, twelve years later when I mentioned it over dinner after watching "Casablanca."

And so began my crusade to find this movie. All I knew was that it had a floating cube, a shootout in a restaurant resembling Rick's "Cafe Americain," indoor snow, and a scene where a schoolchild almost spilled mustard on a man's exposed brain.

It wasn't until my junior year of college that I found it, in the sci-fi section of the Northfield Video Update. I watched it, and was astonished at how amateurish the movie was. It was fun to see Raul Julia, who had recently passed on, and I decided that the movie was intensely cheezy, probably disliked by most (and with good reason), but that it had it's own particular charms. I do have a soft spot for cheeze, after all.

So it was with great joy that I discovered MST3K was doing the movie. Sadly, I kept missing that episode. This year, I finally managed to catch it via timed record. And it was worth the wait. It's a pretty typical MST3K episode, but for me nothing can dim the charm of this crazy film. It's a bad movie, make no mistake there. The actors mostly seem embarrassed to be in it and are working without the benefit of direction. The script is putrid. The music is hilariously bad. The general effect is only slightly less comprehensible than the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" segment at the end of "2001." But I still like it, for some inexplicable reason.

As a footnote, I saw "Total Recall" a few years before I finally rediscovered this movie. Although I could not remember much of "Overdrawn" at the time, "Total Recall" still brought back memories and left me with the nagging feeling that I had seem the same thing done better sometime previously. Strange how the memory cheats. Maybe I've become overdrawn at the memory bank myself!

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.

This has got to be one of the funniest MST3K movies ever made, right up there with "The Final Sacrifice" and "Pod People". I have literally watched this about 30 times on tape, and believe it or not, you will actually begin to figure out what is going on (well, kinda). The funniest character has to be the Fat Man! Never has any screen held that much bulk! Also what the heck was the deal with the anteater bashing? Turning Fingal into a babboon to punish him for watching movies? What the heck was that! Watch this on a rainy, gloomy night with Mike and the 'bots, and end up rolling around on the floor laughing your head off! "To Wendy's".

I actually had some hopes for this adaptation. The original short story on which this adaptation is based was from John Varley's creative peak period, and was funny, clever, inventive, and even moving. It is, in fact, a classic of the Sci Fi genre, which why PBS ranked it along with "The Lathe Of Heaven" as deserving of exposure to a wider audience. And the PBS adaptation of "Lathe" was actually decent - not mind blowing or anything, but watchable and understated and patient in the way it developed and used the ideas from the story.

And Raul Julia was a brilliant actor. There are movies in which the Julia shines like the surface of the sun ("Kiss Of the Spider Woman"), and he is (was) almost always the most interesting actor in any movie he appears in. So I had hopes that this wouldn't suck.

But ODATMB takes this potential and wastes it. While the story is funny and smart-mouthed and satiric and gets in and out quickly after riddling its targets with dozens of sharp-witted barbs, the video adaptation just lumbers along like a bad soap opera. Lines of dialog and exposition that seemed so clever on the printed page just fall flat here. Blame for this falls squarely on the director, who doesn't seem to be able to keep up the snappy pace and rhythms of the story, or get the supporting actors to inhabit the characters or invest them with any charisma. Especially egregious are some really crappy performances by minor actors, walk-ons and extras that simply drag the movie down several notches. Don't know if the blame rests with them, or (again) with the director for not insisting on keep doing takes until they came up with better readings of their lines. Julia himself is still a live-wire and a fire-hose of energy, but he's out there all alone with no acting support.

Also to blame are the dreadful video and special effects - especially lame are the documentary stock film sequences which have Julia's voice-over trying to tie the grainy footage with the sci-fi elements of 'doppling'. It's a cheap trick and a cheap attempt to do an end-run around the need to depict the central concept of 'doppling' into a specially prepared animal as a vacation from the pressures of life in 'the future', and it doesn't work at all.

And the whole 'Casablanca' tie in just lies there. The one good thing about it is that if any modern actor could do Bogart properly, it might well be Julia. The thought of him actually being in a remake of 'Casablanca' generates practically the only good-will I felt for the movie.

I can't bear to give anything with Raul Julia in it a '1' (not even the movie version of 'Street Fighter'), so I give it a '2' out of 10. Maybe a 2 1/2 for making the attempt in the first place, and for recognizing a great story.

Poor John Varley. Maybe there is something in his style of story telling that just doesn't translate well to movies and screenplay..."Millennium" was another great story that completely fell apart in the film version. Who can say???

Like everyone else I saw this 'movie' on MST3K. Oh the humanity...

What I'll add is that if you've ever been involved in any kind of low-budget filmmaking this thing is great fun to watch. It's shot on videotape so it looks like some community college media class' final exam. Like so many others they use a modern mall as a bland future-scape. They obviously spent a huge amount trying to look 'high-tech' and it all just comes off looking silly (even, I think, back in '85). And add in the inexplicable presence of A-list actor Raul Julia (who had already appeared in John Cassavettes "The Tempest" and Francis Coppola's "One from the Heart" in 1982) and you've got a 'wriggle-uncomfortably-and-embarrassingly-in-your-chair' masterpiece!

Try and not shudder as:

o Raul Julia does a bad Bogart impression!

o Raul Julia does a voiceover while pretending he's a drunk monkey!

o They repeat the phrase 'fingal-dopple' over & over!

Think Matrix meets Brainstorm meets Casablanca meets Rollerball meets Dr. Who!!!