mergatroid-1 A lot of people are trashing this movie, but for a low budget scifi it was actually pretty good. It had an interesting story, the acting was pretty good, and even the effects weren't bad for such a low budget production.I've seen this movie two or three times over the years and I still notice new stuff in it.If you're looking for a not too serious scifi movie to watch some night, or it comes on TV then go ahead and watch it. Julia was a great actor taken well before his time, and the way he manages to stand out in such a low budget affair shows why.

Greg Eichelberger Film was produced by WNET in New York, with post-production work done in Canada (it figures). In the undetermined future, Aram Fingal (the late Raul Julia-"The Addams Family," "Kiss of the Spider Woman," "The Burning Season") is a data processor for the gigantic Novicorp Corporation, who, after being caught watching a much better movie -"Casablanca" - on company time, is forced to submit to a mental rehabilitation (called "doppling" here). At the Nirvana Center (a large mall), he meets rehab programmer, Apollonia James (Linda Griffiths), who eventually becomes his tepid love interest. As he is "doppled" into the brain of a baboon (a series of stock footage with Julia's lame voice overs adds to the unintentional hilarity), a stupid kid on a tour switches his identification tag with a corpse. Why a group of unruly moppets are allowed to run free in an operating roam is never answered, by the way.Meanwhile, Fingal, with the assistance of plot holes that Dom DeLuise could fit through, creates his own fantasy world based upon the classic, Academy-Award-winning 1942 film starring himself as Rick as played by Humphrey Bogart, Griffiths as Elsa (portrayed 350 million light years better by Ingrid Bergman), and Louis Negin as a prissy and annoying Peter Lorre knock-off. The Chairman of Novicorp, "The Chairman" (Donald C. Moore) also joins in the fun as "The Fat Man," as if anyone cares. A confusing series of events is not left well enough alone as the ending clears up nothing, as the plot of "Berlin Alexanderplotz" was more coherent. And what was the point of the whole cube thing; the "I've Interfaced!" baloney, the poorly-conceived masturbation scene; as well as the spinning electron Julias, anyway? As bad as the writing and acting (Julia is twice as bad in a dual role and Griffith spends most of the time staring at a computer screen), however, it's the not-so-special effects that drop this turkey a few feet below sewer level. Ultra-cheap graphics conjure up images of Pong, Wang Computers, the video by The Buggles, and the season they videotaped episodes of "The Twilight Zone." State-of-the-art technology it's not, and today, high school kids can design better looking graphics on the Macs. These not-so special effects make the juvenile work in 1980's "Puma Man" seem like Pixar animation.Film also tries to tell us that ridiculous names such as Aram, Apollonia, Crull Spier, Emmaline Ozmondo and Geddy Arbeid, will be commonplace. An unforgivably bad motion picture on every level.

I_R_Riley I actually got a headache from watching this film. I can't remember the last time that I felt that bad from watching a show. I won't even explain this move because you have to experience the pure nausea inducing movie to truly discover why life is so precious. I doubted everything, even the existence of myself, after about three minutes of this film. I don't remember much of the end. Just that it hurt. What I do remember involves a mysterious woman in a clam, a matrix like premise, doopling, cinemas, The guy who played in the Adams Family, a love story, A fat man, a bartender, and a headache. Just thinking about this makes me want to vomit. DOOPLING!

Diana Whoof. I have now watched this movie six times, and am finally coming to terms with what little plot there actually is. Large parts of this horrible, lame PBS production make no sense at all, making you wonder if the writers were smoking something heavy while adapting this script from the short story.Basically, we have Aram Fingal(Raul Julia, from Puerto Rico, no less! Aram Fingal?) a low on the totem pole computer programmer who is so bored with his job at a huge, world spanning corporation that he spends his time watching forbidden 'cinemas'(although really just Casablanca) at work. His supervisor, annoyed at his lack of output, sends him to a 'psychist' to get mentally adjusted(as Tom Servo comments"so aging lesbian nuns rule the future?") She sends him to a place called Nirvana Village to be 'doppled'. This involves having his identity put into a glowing Borg Christmas ornament, and then being transferred into an animal's mind in their wild animal park so that he can experience life through new eyes. Not only is this a rather stupid concept, but this will cure him of his love of cinemas how? It's his boring job that was causing him to break into the cinema bus master in the first place. Being a baboon for two days isn't going to accomplish anything except to teach him how to fling his own filth at his supervisor.Something goes wrong with Fingal's dopple, and the techs(including the ridiculously named Appollonia James-I love some of the names in this movie) discover that a child on a field trip has switched the tag on Fingal's body so that it didn't go to the sleep room but somewhere else. So they have to find it, and in the meantime they dump Fingal's personality into a huge computer.Here's where the movie becomes particularly senseless. Fingal creates his own reality in the computer, spends half his time trying to reprogram it for some reason, and the rest hanging out at a bad simulation of Rick's Place from Casablanca. The Novicorp chairman, a rolled pork roast in a sweat stained white suit, follows him around in the computer threatening him because he keeps reprogramming the computer from the inside. I was never sure WHY he was doing this, as all it seemed to accomplish was making the fat guy mad. But, oh well. There's a tense moment or two at the end(I guess) where Apollonia is trying frantically to rescue Fingal's personality(that is, of course ,assuming he has one) after the cube that held it is destroyed. Fingal is put back into his newly found body, and declares that he's going to fight the system. Frankly, the system didn't seem all that Big Brother-ish, so all the hoopla over it just seemed kind of silly. But then, that was the essence of this film-silly, and confusing. PBS, you have a lot to answer for.