Reviews

I liked the idea of the twist midday through this movie and the initial stages of the execution of it. But then it gets tedious when you realize that in a 75 minute movie you end up watching the same 30 or so minute section twice with relatively small additions/expansions of the initial view in the second run through. The initial watch of those 30 minutes was pretty slow. The second watch is more interesting, but the problem is that you know already what's going to happen, so it stretches out way too long.

The first episode of this show had me thinking this could end up being an almost worthy follow up to Eastbound and Down. It was over the top funny, Don Cheadle's character seemed to have a lot of promise, the plotting was inventive, and there were some hilariously inventive little jokes (Lehman Brothers being just two actual twin brothers killed me).

But now I've watched episodes two, three, and four, and I think I'm done. I don't know what the show wants to be. It's dropped almost all the comedy in favor of drama, but the characters are all basically ridiculous and unrealistic, so having them try to do a drama doesn't work at all. Most of the acting aside from Don Cheadle is mediocre to bad. The limited, scattered attempts at humor after the initial episode almost all fall flat. None of the side players at the firm are funny at all, and they are not good enough actors to pull off drama. And they're not giving Don Cheadle much to work with either with comedy or drama. The pilot showed the basis for him to be a Kenny Powers sort of mix of comedy and pathos, but the writing has completely fallen flat in delivering on that.

There's definitely a pattern here. The episodes that completely ignore the PKD stories they are supposedly based on are all just awful (the unwatchable "Crazy Diamond" being the bottom of the barrel). Not that the others are anything great, but the ones that at least retain some key recognizable elements of the PKD stories (e.g. "Impossible Planet" or "Human Is" or "Commuter") are at least mediocre to good. This episode is supposedly based on "Foster, You're Dead," but there is NOTHING from that story anywhere in the episode other than a name (and even that is flipped from a last to first name for no apparent reason), and it is just a muddled, boring mess.

"Sales Pitch" by PKD is a decent little story, a funny take on over-intrusive advertising. It actually could have more resonance these days with the advent of ad companies that exist to spy on users and sell their personal information to the highest bidder, like Google and Facebook. But instead of maybe taking the story more in that direction, this idiocy ditches any semblance of the PKD story except a couple character names and replaces it with basically nothing. There is nothing of any interest at all in this episode, just an incoherent mess and a complete waste of time.

I love PKD. I've read almost everything he wrote multiple times. Without the name "Philip K. Dick" in the title, I doubt I would have paid any attention to this show, and I guess that was the point of calling it that. In reality, the show has very little to do with PKD. It's just another generic Twilight Zone knock off with a souped up name. The first episode, "Real Life," has nothing to do with the PKD story it is supposedly based on. "Exhibit Piece.". Nothing. "Exhibit Piece" is not a good story really, but if you are supposedly making a TV episode of it, why go off and make a mediocre separate story having nothing to do with the claimed source?

The second episode, "Autofac," is supposedly based on the story of the same name. At least this one retains some of the basic setup of the PKD story, but then goes off in a completely different and much less interesting direction. Who are these TV writing bozos who think they need to ditch superior source material written by someone far, far their better to do their own thing? Autofac the TV episode is only really memorable for having one of the most ridiculous and pointless sex scenes I can remember seeing.

This is a pretty silly movie but sickly entertaining overall as described in various other reviews. I was constantly taken out of the move, though, by one of the worst, most inappropriate musical scores I can remember hearing in a movie. Much of it sounds like someone trying -- and failing badly quality wise -- to imitate one of John Carpenter's synthesizer-heavy scores. Sometimes it switches to something like an obnoxious lullaby. Sometimes it's just random disco. Always bad, also noticeable and annoying, always inappropriate for the mood that would otherwise be created by what's on the screen.

First off, this is not a horror movie by any reasonable definition of the genre. It's clearly heavily inspired by Ginger Snaps but is a far inferior movie. The lead character repeatedly doing random gross things just to try to shock the audience is juvenile. Even ignoring the little disgusting things she does, I can't remember another movie with a more unlikable lead character than this one. Just an awful human being to everyone around her. Yet somehow it's clear the director expects us to sympathize with her. As much of a ridiculous caricature as Tracy Lords' character is, she comes off as much more sympathetic despite the director's intentions. Same thing in her scenes with John Waters, who is one of a number of silly cameos. Hey, it's John Waters playing a priest, how ironic! Look, Malcolm McDowell! That's Ray Wise! It's that guy from Criminal Minds! They just draw attention to themselves and take you out of the movie. Repeated overly long dream sequences also get old quickly. For some reason I kept watching this all the way to the end, which turned out to be another ridiculous attempt to shock the audience, but it had no impact, because I didn't care by that point.

After this movie was over and the credits rolled, my reaction was, "Wow, that was stupid." While actually watching it, though, it was entertaining enough. Pretty much anything with Kari Matchett in it is probably going to be worth watching as far as I'm concerned. Mostly thanks to her (the Rowdy Roddy Piper look-a-like was good too), the acting in this movie is actually much better than in the original, where it was pretty damn bad aside from the guy who played Worth. The most annoying thing about this movie is how lazy the script is. The writers throw in a bunch of catch phrases they probably picked up in a popular science book (I'm guessing Hyperspace by Michio Kaku), but they had either read the book a while ago and forgotten what the terms actually meant or didn't understand them in the first place. How much would it have cost to hire a physicist to work with them on the script for a couple days so that their ideas (which could have been interesting) actually made sense and weren't implemented in such a laughably nonsensical way?