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Darkdrive

Darkdrive (1997) Movie Poster
  •  USA  •    •  88m  •    •  Directed by: Phillip J. Roth.  •  Starring: Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi, Claire Stansfield, Nick Eldredge, Ken Olandt, Christian W.C. Ryser, Suzanne Charnos, Barry Ross Rinehart, Christopher Goodson, Thomas Craig Elliott, Natasha Roth, Natalie Scandiuzzi, Kerry Skalsky, Marcus Aurelius.  •  Music by: Jim Goodwin.
        In the near future, a new law has criminals sent to a virtual reality world as their prison, built by a shadowy corporation called Zircon based in Seattle. The designer of the system, Steven Falcon, realizes the danger of it being overloaded and of hackers who try to break in and steal files only to have the prisoners try to break out via that method. When Falcon threatens to quit the operation, he becomes marked for murder by his employers who force him to enter the Matrix virtual reality/afterlife to find the source of the danger of the system crashing.

Review:

Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
Image from: Darkdrive (1997)
I often watch movies that make no sense in which characters keep doing stupid things that make no sense for them to do merely to keep the plot going ("Do NOT ever go into that cellar!), or built on premises that defy most known logic to start with (The Giant Claw springs to mind for some reason) but Darkdrive really does make no sense. It starts out by looking like it is going to make sense - in an incredibly clunky, by the numbers clichéd manner; the first act is almost a paint-by-numbers assemblage of stock action thriller lines - but by the end all semblance of logic had been thrown out of the window and driven away to the local dump.

At the start of the movie our hero is a whizz-kid programmer working for a morally dubious corporation who runs the penal system of the future by digitising villains into a virtual prison - called guess what? 'The Matrix' - and 'terminating' the bodies. By the end of the movie he is trapped in the self same virtual reality prison with his dead wife and a little girl who had a couple of lines at the start of the show, caught in some endless looping mashup of Groundhog Day Existenz Overdrawn at the Memory Bank but with more guns and swearing. The hero meets himself and turns out to be the baddie as well. Though how he got there before he got there to find himself is never explained. In fact no one knows why anyone is in there - or indeed how they got there (Mrs Hero for instance was blown up by a booby-trapped picnic hamper in the middle of a field*, nowhere near the brazzillion tons of special effects - OK, a chair and an arc lamp - needed to get her husband Tronned). It almost becomes hypnotically wonderful, as if David Lynch had directed Time Cop. (A feeling heightened by great chunks of the music which was as near to being Laura's Theme from Twin Peaks as you could get without being sued.) I may watch it again.

* Never, EVER! tell your husband you're pregnant just after he's walked out on an Evil Corporation.


Review by junk-monkey from the Internet Movie Database.