Movie	Extras
Audio	Video

This is the region 1 release review.

Movie
What the hell does this movie have do to with the Stephen King short story?  This may be the movie based on a story which has the least amount of carryover from that story.  The only connection this has with the short story is the name, and perhaps the use of a lawnmower (although even that isn’t quite true in the short story).  This movie is about a computer genius who uses a mentally challenged man as a guinea pig to test out his theory that virtual reality can be used to increase intelligence.

The effects were impressive considering it was done back in 1992, and there are a lot of them.  What was nice is that, just like in ‘Tron’, the effects here were used to create a computer reality instead of used to try to enhance the look of the real world.  I doubt, though, that CG effects would have looked real if they would have been used as real world enhancement on such a small budget.

Pierce Brosnan (all those Bond movies) and Jeff Fahey (all those B movies) were good as, respectively, the computer genius and the guinea pig.  The story moves along nicely, with an unnecessary sex scene, until the guinea pig starts using his new-found powers in inexplicable ways.  (Telekinetic powers are fine, but not when they mix in computers and the real world.  (Kind of spoiler here: I’ll make it clearer.  His taking apart of people in small balls, or his use of CG bugs to attack people makes no sense in the context of the story.  End of spoiler.))

So this movie is passable, but moves kind of slowly and could use some coherence at the end.  The sequel-happy ending could have also been left out.  The 23 minutes of CG animation are very nice.  All in all, it has its faults but if you’re not a tough movie-watcher it should pass the time for 100 minutes.

Commentary with director Brett Leonard and producer Gimel Everett
Subpar commentary.  Brett Leonard seems to laugh too much at his own jokes.  The commentary starts off nicely, but as the film loses speed, so do the comments.  They become more and more tedious.  They seem to talk about Pierce’s face and how great looking he is throughout the movie.  They offer some interesting pieces of information, such as this movie was made for only about 5.5 million dollars.  After about half way through, they seem to run out of things to say and make some uninteresting comments instead of having dead air.  One thing I found amusing is that the director kept saying that this movie was inspired by a short story written by a famous writer, but never actually identified the writer by name.  I guess Mr. King doesn’t want to be associated with this project.  (Am I completely insane or is there a director’s cut of this movie that runs about 40 minutes longer?  I’m leaning towards insane.)

Deleted Scenes
These 12 scenes (unfortunately without commentary) are nice but it can be seen why there were left out of the movie.  They add little but are interesting to watch on their own.  In all they run just under 27 minutes.

Cast
Only Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey are here.  It comes with a little background information on both actors and we can see three clips from Pierce’s previous movies (‘Live Wire’, ‘Detonator’ and ‘Detonator 2’, all owned by New Line, which explains this nifty little extra.).  I actually like this very much, and would like to see more DVDs with this.

Trailer
This trailer pretty much shows the entire movie.  It’s interesting to note that there’s one line in here that isn’t in the movie ore the deleted scenes.  (I can only assume it’s in the director’s cut.)

Computer animation
Pretty cool sequence with nifty music.  It’s about 4 out of the 23 minutes of computer animation edited together with original music.

On The Set
A four and a half minute electronic press kit-style feature.  It’s only a few interviews with the main cast, and the director expressing his views about virtual reality.  It’s not too exciting but better than some featurettes I’ve seen.

Audio
Not a huge audio intensive movie.  Apart from the CG animation sequences, this movie is pretty much all talking.  The dialogue was clear and the music was nicely balanced.  Nothing too loud or too soft.

Video
1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen.  Very clear picture and very little dust and particles.  The animation sequences were very colorful and very clear.  Pierce’s face was always nicely visible, and that should please many people.

put up sometime in October 2002