Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Watch it on Cinemax at 5:00 AM on a Monday morning or buy this DVD if you want to watch this strange digest of other film concepts.

The cast seems like the A-List of 1999 who happened to be in between other studio projects and dropped in on this film to just hang out and do a movie.


First year acting school students are given improvisational assignments to convince the audience an inert object like a coffee mug or the recalcitrant professors ball point pen are a meaningful object and have to interact and portray that object as a significant story element.

Jude Law and JJLeigh seem to replicate a better acting school exercise as they carefully cultivate and protect the "Game Pods" which are organic looking cybernetic storage devices which are just latex movie props from John Carpenter and Alien movies the studio didn't want to throw away just yet.

So, they built a film around the characters who use the GamePods as a portal to a Matrix like reality where they jump in and out of multiple sub realties in a life like game without a real or even stated goal just like EverQuest that encases other mini-realities like Virtuosity until the viewer becomes more annoyed than intrigued. Later, there are the revealing true realities like the end scene of Jacobs Ladder until you realize it is another double cross.

You likely won't notice this because you'll either stop watching this film or your TV will be broken by whatever heavy object you've flung at it in an attempt to abruptly relieve yourself from this waste of time impersonating a movie.

The special effects are nonexistent beyond blood squibs under the actors shirts to simulate gun shot and there is a semi-steamy love scene with Jude Law and JJL that includes some chest fondling but none of her trademark nudity that makes her films bearable sometimes.

[Existenz [IMPORT]Forget "The Matrix". Now, really forget it. It's a different movie. "eXistenZ" lives in a world, or really nested realities, all its own. Cronenberg is a master of mixing up reality with non-reality and physical with non-physical. I think one of the beauties of "eXistenZ" is the ugliness of the Virtual Reality world created by Geller's (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) half-mutant amphibian/half plastic game pod. The icky porting into it with an umbilical cord into the spinal column is so Cronenberg. I liked the way he had the characters (and us) believing they were out of the game when they were still in it... those pesky nested realities. It does harken back to some of Philip K. Dick's visionary short stories, as well as Cronenberg's own "Videodrome" (especially with the "Death to..." sequence). I also liked the use of some of Canada's best actors who have since become more well known, such as Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie (by way of Sutherland, England), and Sarah Polley. In fact, Cronenberg played a character in Don McKellar's 2000 film, "Last Night", which also starred McKellar, Rennie, and Polley, not to mention Sandra Oh. I liked the way some of the characters in the Virtual Reality did not respond unless they were fed the correct line. That was brilliant, and I have not seen that done anywhere before or since. I also liked the gun made out of a jawbone that fired teeth for bullets. Cronenberg is brilliant. Take a pop over the Amazon's sister site, IMDb.com, and look at Cronenberg's filmography. There isn't a bad apple in the bunch, and you would do well to watch them all. "Naked Lunch" and "Dead Ringers" are just two out of many that would stand out if you liked "eXistenZ".