Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Warning: contains dolphin-related spoilers!

This write-up is based on the clearly superior Japanese cut of the movie. Why is it superior? Because it features more of Takeshi Kitano and Dolph Lundgren and its third act vaguely makes sense, if you squint.

The close cyberpunk future of 1995+whatever. Okay, it’s 2021, but really and of course, it’s 1995’s 2021. Johnny (Keanu Reeves) works as a data courier, which is to say, he has replaced the part of his long term memory used for his childhood memories with sensational 80GB of data so he can literally carry data around in his head. He’s even upgrading to humungous 160GB right at the start of the movie, so take that, SanDisk!

Alas, the super secret and extra dangerous data his middle-man Ralfi (Udo Kier) has lined up for him that is supposed to pay for getting Johnny's childhood memories back, is much larger than that, which leads to dangerous side effects the longer the data is in Johnny’s head. In two days or so, his head will – figuratively or actually, we don’t know – explode.

That’s not even the biggest of Johnny’s problems. The data is hardly in his head when a team of Yakuza doing the dirty work for an evil pharma corporation ambush him and his clients. Johnny barely manages to escape – he’s luckier there than his clients are – but only has one third of the codes needed to encrypt the data – the only way to get it out of his head.

Hunted by the Yakuza, – we regularly pop in with their boss Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano) who is going through the early stages of grief for the loss of his child – and the corp, and betrayed by Ralfi, our hero’s quest for getting rid of the data is supported by street samurai/bodyguard Jane (Dina Meyer) and the anti-corporate resistance whose leader isn’t actually Ice-T like we might at first think but a damn dolphin. Also involved are a crazy, evil, cybernetic street preacher (Dolph Lundgren dressed up as post-apocalyptic Moses), and barely coherent, yet awesome, monologues during which Johnny wrestles with his conscience as well as the importance of room service.

Some movies don’t age gracefully; others, like Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic get better – well, immensely more entertaining – once they’ve got a couple of decades behind them. Today, it is easy to enjoy this as an intensely 90s movie, whereas during the 90s, it was exactly its extreme 90s-ness that made it practically unwatchable.

Today, when we have reached a state of practical corporate ownership (he said, using a Google site to post this on) that just doesn’t look as sexy and absurd as the one portrayed in the movie, the film’s bad future seems incredibly attractive. It is, after all full of hot people dressed up like extras from an Italian post-apocalyptic movie, contains a cyberspace that looks like a digital psychedelic light show instead of being the place where crazy people shout at each other for all eternity, and has 160GB of RAM in its head (and very little else).

I respect the hell out of Johnny Mnemonic as a bizarre high-ish budget cyberpunk as pulp movie as well: the brazen absurdity of its awesome, nonsensical production design, the straight-up nuttiness and glorious dumbness of its action set pieces, William Gibson’s deep if you’ve imbibed enough, otherwise nonsensical  philosophical monologues poor Reeves has to get through, the willingness to go with silly, “cool” ideas instead of aiming for boring depth – it’s all good in a “how did they manage to get a budget for this” way, and great as popular cinema no populace in its right mind actually watches gets.

To really draw in an audience of me, the film features a wish list of cult movie favourites in roles large and small: Keanu is at that point in his career when he has learned enough basic acting skills to get through scenes without falling over his own feet and shows the awesome ability to keep a straight face even when he shares a scene with Moses Lundgren and a dolphin, or when Henry Rollins rants into his face. He’s also young enough to be agile and fast in action sequences without too much help from the editing room. I very much suspect his back hurts less, as well. Then we get Kitano (who has something of a plausible character arc in the Japanese cut) being Kitano, Kier as ready for anything as he ever was, Dolph looking as if he really enjoys himself, Ice-T doing his usual shtick for non-cop roles, Meyer aiming for intense and dangerous but often only hitting cute, Barbara Sukowa as an AI (don’t ask)… It’s pretty fantastic.

In other words, this one really is in dire need of a reassessment from the larger cult movie audience, because it is a wonderfully entertaining piece of bizarro nonsense that’s also a time capsule of an in hindsight simpler, quieter, and certainly more hopeful even in its dystopias time.

In short: Bats (1999)

A small town in Texas has developed a bit of a bat problem. Two flying dogs infected with an experimental virus have escaped the laboratory of mad scientist Dr. McCabe (Bob Gunton) and have infected the local bat population, turning them into a murderous, tactically adept swarm of super bats. Of course we will later learn McCabe was trying to weaponize bats for the government, turning them stronger, more intelligent, omnivorous and just plain evil. Whatever could go wrong?

The CDC very quickly flies in chiropterologist Dr. Sheila Casper (Dina Meyer) and her assistant Jimmy (Leon). Together with local Sheriff Emmett Kimsey (Lou Diamond Phillipps, of course) they’ll have quite the time fighting what will turn out to be not just a murderous bat-menace but in fact the dawning of the batpocalypse. (And let’s not even think about what’ll happen if that virus reached Gotham City).

Yes yes yes, I know the plot of this thing is silly, its science absurd, and its characters shallow, but Louis Morneau’s Bats is also a whole load of fun when you’re in the mood to watch a highly traditional film about animals/monsters attacking a US small town. It might even be the platonic ideal of the form, cutting off all extraneous meat – nobody needs to get over a divorce here, there are no children involved except as bat food – only leaving the most important and tastiest bits of its genre. On the writing level, it also recommends itself by having a female lead scientist who never becomes The Girl but stays convincingly competent and tough without being an asshole about it (which is just the right role for Dina Meyer), no romance but more a not even grudgingly growing friendship between the main characters, a black character who might be the comic relief (of dubious merit) but is still allowed to actually do something and – spoilers, sweeties! - doesn’t die, and possibly the most ridiculous animal species to weaponize imaginable (unless there’s a film about killer goldfish I’m not aware of, Megashark vs Giant Goldfish, perhaps).

Add to that Morneau’s typically excellent direction, filled with cleverly set-up moments of classic suspense, breakneck pacing and an ability to create a sense of place that helps proceedings feel less generic than they actually are, and you have one of the finest examples of this sub-genre you could imagine. But that’s not all: there are also the ridiculously awesome animatronic bat puppets used for most close-ups of our monsters, as well as the film’s many scenes of bats crawling around that look less like bats than like the stuff of nightmares, a fine send-up of the genre-typical “but one still survived!” ending, the total uselessness of the US military, the Sheriff rocking Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and so on and so fort. I think I’m in love, and it’s Bats!

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Riddles of the Sphinx (2008)

Of course, having decided to return to my irregular habit of taking a walk back through the SyFy Original catalogue from time to time, I begin by watching a movie so bad, it could have been improved mightily by not having been made at all, so the universe stays cruel instead of just indifferent.

Riddles of the Sphinx, as directed by one George Mendeluk - who I try not to call a hack because rudeness is wrong even in the face of a deeply shitty film - concerns the adventures of Dina Meyer whose character isn’t supposed to be a Lara Croft rip-off, oh no, and Lochlyn Munro who just happens to dress just like that New Mexico Smith guy, as well as of Munro’s character’s obnoxious, all-knowing teenage daughter. There’s a bit about a secret government agency, the threat of the Plague of Isis™ coming to destroy our planet, crappy dimension portals leading to really crappy riddles (and yes, there’s even a variation of that one whose adaptation in the film clearly suggests somebody got his Christian and Ancient Egyptian virtues mixed up writing this crap), Mackenzie Gray playing a character whose baldness clearly demonstrates he’s going to turn out to be evil and other nonsense that could have turned out rather entertaining in other hands (Paul Ziller’s, say) but is here presented with all the verve and charm of something completely without verve and charm (a trashcan?).

There’s just no minute on screen when the film actually commits to entertaining its audience. Instead it is going through the motions in a way I found incredibly annoying, bringing up silly ideas without ever seeing the potential in them, thinking nothing through, and not making up for any of this by any morsel of visual excitement, or just even mild interesting-ness. Obviously, a SyFy budget also doesn’t lend itself too well to a globe trotting adventure (something many other SyFy movies solve by having the Apocalypse take place in Kansas), so expect (or if you’re clever – avoid) really bad CGI not only with the film’s titular monster (which everyone involved must have been so embarrassed about, it’s more often than not replaced by its “human form”, a big guy with Halloween fake teeth in his mouth), but also coming into play for all the places the characters visit that can’t be replaced by two tiny locations in British Columbia.

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