“I’m interfacing!”

Justin’s rating: Honestly, at this point a week in a monkey’s body would be a dream vacation.

Justin’s review: Before he was kissing up Angelica Houston’s arm and laying waste to villages on Tuesdays, Raul Julia stunned the world with his daring and magnificent turn as Aram Fingal, Processor Third Class in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. And if you know anything about spotting pure quality in cinema, it’s that a film title that utilizes a pun is certain to be award bait.

A cheap TV movie made for PBS (!) and filmed on videotape, Memory Bank attempts to be the modern 1984… filmed in 1984. I guess dystopian visions were all the hot rage for a minute there. Good thing that never came back in the form of cheesy young adult scifi romances.

Aram works for Nova Corp, which I guess is supposed to be this all-powerful company although the movie doesn’t have the vision to make it look like anything more fierce than a stint at Met Life. Stuck in a job monitoring data, Aram hacks his computer terminal so that he can watch the opening credits of Casablanca in full view of his coworkers and supervisor.

Naturally, this rebellious attitude gets him sent to a shrink, who declares that Aram has to spend two days in “dopple,” which I guess is a kind of virtual reality where you inhabit an animal. Not sure what this is supposed to do, but those wacky dystopian governments rarely make sense, so into Porky and Flipper we go!

Actually, Aram gets assigned to a mangy old baboon (pause for laughter) but ends up escaping that body and fleeing deep into the computer simulator. This rogue behavior causes no end of grief for Nova Corp, as Aram now has the power to control the system and make his own reality. Hack the planet! Stick it to the Man! Aram for President 2024!

Also, the woman assigned to oversee his doppling falls in love with him, because who wouldn’t stare at a guy inhabiting a baboon and think, “I need me some of that in my life!?”

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank has high aspirations of crafting a vision of a future where people are controlled by technology and bug-eating primates. It’s a shame that it’s crammed into a low-budget, low-fidelity soap opera that looks cheaper than ’70s episodes of Doctor Who. Its themes are hard to take seriously when everything looks like it’s produced by daytime TV studios, but if anyone can make it work, it’s Raul “Dr. Frankenstein” Julia.

Sorry, he couldn’t make it work.

I like the guy, but his face is wrong for an everydayman, which is what this script requires. And he’s having to carry the load of incomprehensible lingo, silly concepts, and a budget that probably didn’t cover the rooms at the hotel where this was obviously shot. The special effects are… woof. I have to imagine that Neil Breen saw them and stood up to give an approving slow clap.

It also doesn’t help that this keeps making references to Casablanca. As I never say, “It’s a great idea for a lackluster movie for continually reference a much, much better film!”

Then again, maybe you’re on a quest to watch every cyber-hacking whatever from the ’80s, and if that’s the case, you’re more than welcome to the mind-blowing adventures of Aram the Baboon.

Intermission!

• Love at first sight… over a stream of bodies being wheeled between them
• “Aram Fingal” is the worst made-up name I’ve ever heard
• Such cheap scifi credits
• Dystopian companies really don’t like it when you watch movies on their time
• What is a “Psychist?”
• “Ask about his mother.”
• If you ask a woman out 62 times and she turns you down each one, don’t give up!
• Yeah don’t mind us, we’re going to install a plug into your skull
• You can take the top of someone’s skull off without any blood whatsoever
• “You could have gotten mustard all over his brain!”
• Maybe don’t let little kids mess around in the surgery room
• Make sure you call movies “cinemas” and potato chips “flava-flavs”
• An elephant attacking a tree with a baboon in it is call for a CODE RED
• Really, you just watch this for the worst scifi special effects ever
• Always a good time when your dead mom shows up to give you soup
• THE PLACE
• “You lost my body?”
• Turning computer discs into flowers