OVERDRAWN AT THE MEMORY BANK
A film review by Christopher E. Meadows
Copyright 1997 Christopher E. Meadows
84 minutes, color
Starring Raul Julia, Linda Griffiths, Wanda Cannon, Donald C. Moore, Chapelle Jaffe, Louis Negin
Produced by Robert Lantos & Stephen J. Roth
Directed by Douglas Williams
MPAA: Not Rated (though from language, violence, medical-gross-outs, and sexual content, I'd put it at PG)
My rating: 7/10
Though made in Canada, "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" traces its roots to the BBC school of film production. Using, for the most part, cheap computer and video special effects, chyron text, wildlife documentary footage, and sets that are sometimes obviously faked up, it nonetheless manages to tell a good enough science fiction story that by the time you're twenty minutes into it, you should be hooked.
Raul Julia plays Aram Fingal, a drone data processing worker for Novicorp whose active imagination and predilection for hacking gets him into trouble with authority. Caught watching "Casablanca" on his desk monitor, Fingal is sentenced to "doppling" rehabilitation--he is to spend forty-eight hours in the body of a baboon. (How exactly this is supposed to rehabilitate him is anybody's guess.) As it happens, thanks to a visiting schoolboy's prank, his body is temporarily misplaced, and his mind has to be shunted into the central computer to keep him alive until they can find it. As time ticks away before his memory cube self-destructs, the frantic search for his body is on...while Fingal first creates a virtual reality fantasy world, then finds there's no better way to hack the system than from the inside.
During the chaos, computer technician Apollonia James (Linda Griffiths) maintains contact with Fingal through a datalink, manifesting several different times to offer advice or warnings. Over the course of their interactions, interest on both their parts grows into a budding romance.
Given that "Casablanca" is Fingal's favorite film, and the basis for his fantasy world, a great deal of the movie is homage to "Casablanca". In fact, the Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre characters make appearances (played by Julia in a dual role and Louis Negin, respectively) in a bar called "The Place". Julia's portrayal of Bogart is passable, and avoids becoming the "schweethaat"-spouting parody seen in cartoons. Negin's Peter Lorre is quite credible, and easily the best Peter Lorre I've ever seen who wasn't the real thing. The two of them, as characters created by Fingal's imagination, serve as aspects of his personality, driving him on in his quest to hack the computer system.
Those aren't the only Casablanca characters to put in appearances. The Sydney Greenstreet character also happens to be around...as "The Fat Man", the alternate aspect of the film's main villain, the Novicorp Chairman (Donald C. Moore). While Fingal's body is lost, the Fat Man tries to stop him from hacking the system...with less than salutory results.
It's interesting to note the futuristic slang words that are thrown about left and right during the film, in the best golden-age science fiction tradition. Words like "dopple", "psychist", "computech", "cinema", and "reconst" are apparently in common use. And while people of today may well laugh at fourteen years past's idea of futuristic data processing clerks, some aspects of this film are surprisingly perfectly in keeping with the way we think of "virtual reality" today. As cyberpunk films go, this may not be a staple of the genre, but it's definitely recommended viewing.
The special effects are very primitive, placing this production in the realm of low-to-medium-budget television. The music is completely electronic-synthesized, which fits the low budget but isn't really out of keeping with the genre. However, the writing quite makes up for it. There are some very funny moments, and quite a few little in-jokes that one needs to have seen "Casablanca" to appreciate properly. All in all, I give "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" a 7 out of 10.
This review is copyright 1997 by Christopher E. Meadows. Permission granted for free distribution over Usenet and associated archival, and for archival and display associated with the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com). All other distribution requires permission from the author.
-- Chris Meadows aka | Author, Team M.E.C.H.A., Crapshoot & Co. Robotech_Master | on the Superguy Listserv (bit.listserv.superguy) robotech@jurai.net | With a World Wide Web homepage located at robotech@eyrie.org | http://www.jurai.net/~robotech/index.html
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