Video game developer Clayton Software enlists the talents of a misfit group of programmers to develop the scariest computer combat game: EVILUTION. With four weeks to bring the game to market and a million-dollar bonus on the line, they utilize a telemetry suit to render a 3-D version of the onscreen player. But when a power surge gives the hard drive a mind of its own, the suit comes to life to play the game for real and the programming team find themselves in the middle of a chilling virtual nightmare beyond their wildest imagination.
26 Nov How to Make a Monster (2001)
Makes Itself
I have several movieland people I follow because what they do is pretty interesting. I have a (much larger) list of people that I follow casually because they show promise, or have done something interesting in the past.
This little TeeVee movie popped up because it has three people on the second list.
George is still a hamfisted director, but he started life with a film about film. While unoriginal, it showed what interests him. Such folding in film interests me too. Here he wrote a story about something similar, the folding of film into “real” life and both into the virtual reality of a game. Been done before (the best is “eXistenZ”), and there isn’t much new here except for the fake moral on which he goofs.
The notion of the building’s floor plan being the same as the game’s dungeon was nice.
The second person on my list is Colleen Camp. Former party girl and cheesecake actress, she is an example of someone who worked her way up from buttwiggling to producing. And she has a history in folding as well. “Clue” is my favorite of hers. Here she is the producer of the movie and appears in character as the producer of the game, and with precisely the same charter. She’s red here. I’m sure that the insert of goofy nudity was her idea, and another fold: breasts with attitude controlled by others.
Clea DuVall strikes me as a particularly intelligent actress. She’s the real murderer in “Identity” and the real victim in “Thirteen Conversations” both pretty interesting experiments in novel folding. She knows what she’s about, and can annotate her own character which tends to be shy. She could have been the secretary in “Secretary”.
The final fold here is that she inherits the characteristics of the four people she “interns” for. Cool word that, and it provides the final twist, which I think may be more clever than it appears at first. Especially given who the new intern is.
Posted in 2003
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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