Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

Like everyone else I saw this 'movie' on MST3K. Oh the humanity...

What I'll add is that if you've ever been involved in any kind of low-budget filmmaking this thing is great fun to watch. It's shot on videotape so it looks like some community college media class' final exam. Like so many others they use a modern mall as a bland future-scape. They obviously spent a huge amount trying to look 'high-tech' and it all just comes off looking silly (even, I think, back in '85). And add in the inexplicable presence of A-list actor Raul Julia (who had already appeared in John Cassavettes "The Tempest" and Francis Coppola's "One from the Heart" in 1982) and you've got a 'wriggle-uncomfortably-and-embarrassingly-in-your-chair' masterpiece!

Try and not shudder as:

o Raul Julia does a bad Bogart impression!

o Raul Julia does a voiceover while pretending he's a drunk monkey!

o They repeat the phrase 'fingal-dopple' over & over!

Think Matrix meets Brainstorm meets Casablanca meets Rollerball meets Dr. Who!!!

I actually had some hopes for this adaptation. The original short story on which this adaptation is based was from John Varley's creative peak period, and was funny, clever, inventive, and even moving. It is, in fact, a classic of the Sci Fi genre, which why PBS ranked it along with "The Lathe Of Heaven" as deserving of exposure to a wider audience. And the PBS adaptation of "Lathe" was actually decent - not mind blowing or anything, but watchable and understated and patient in the way it developed and used the ideas from the story.

And Raul Julia was a brilliant actor. There are movies in which the Julia shines like the surface of the sun ("Kiss Of the Spider Woman"), and he is (was) almost always the most interesting actor in any movie he appears in. So I had hopes that this wouldn't suck.

But ODATMB takes this potential and wastes it. While the story is funny and smart-mouthed and satiric and gets in and out quickly after riddling its targets with dozens of sharp-witted barbs, the video adaptation just lumbers along like a bad soap opera. Lines of dialog and exposition that seemed so clever on the printed page just fall flat here. Blame for this falls squarely on the director, who doesn't seem to be able to keep up the snappy pace and rhythms of the story, or get the supporting actors to inhabit the characters or invest them with any charisma. Especially egregious are some really crappy performances by minor actors, walk-ons and extras that simply drag the movie down several notches. Don't know if the blame rests with them, or (again) with the director for not insisting on keep doing takes until they came up with better readings of their lines. Julia himself is still a live-wire and a fire-hose of energy, but he's out there all alone with no acting support.

Also to blame are the dreadful video and special effects - especially lame are the documentary stock film sequences which have Julia's voice-over trying to tie the grainy footage with the sci-fi elements of 'doppling'. It's a cheap trick and a cheap attempt to do an end-run around the need to depict the central concept of 'doppling' into a specially prepared animal as a vacation from the pressures of life in 'the future', and it doesn't work at all.

And the whole 'Casablanca' tie in just lies there. The one good thing about it is that if any modern actor could do Bogart properly, it might well be Julia. The thought of him actually being in a remake of 'Casablanca' generates practically the only good-will I felt for the movie.

I can't bear to give anything with Raul Julia in it a '1' (not even the movie version of 'Street Fighter'), so I give it a '2' out of 10. Maybe a 2 1/2 for making the attempt in the first place, and for recognizing a great story.

Poor John Varley. Maybe there is something in his style of story telling that just doesn't translate well to movies and screenplay..."Millennium" was another great story that completely fell apart in the film version. Who can say???

Let me preface this comment by saying, first, I am an actor in LA, and second, that I am well aware that this is a very bad movie. Stupendously bad. Mind shatteringly bad. Life alteringly bad. OK, fine...it sucked!

But, I feel there are some points that must be made to explain (but by no means excuse) the well-meaning but misguided souls that worked so hard to bring us this dreck.

First, PBS. Granted, this production should never have made it past the first table read. But one must remember that, only a few years before, PBS had been responsible for one of the greatest pieces of sci-fi ever to appear on TV: The Lathe of Heaven. This was a wonderful, faithful adaptation of Ursula LeGuin's story.It was a genuine masterpiece. They probably thought they could do no wrong. How wrong they were. But, for an organisation that is notoriously strapped for cash, the attempt to widen it's appeal is understandable (if not forgivable). At least they hadn't started showing John Tesh concerts, yet.

Second, Raul Julia. A great many people that make comments on this site like to say of a famous actor in a bad film, "he must have needed rent money", or something to that effect. Well, I hate to break it to all you non-actors out there, but the fact is, some of us actually do NEED TO MAKE RENT MONEY. Raul was a great actor, an actors actor, but he was never a superstar. And, at the time Overdrawn At the Memory Bank was made, he had gained some success on the Broadway stage, but he probably still needed the job. The fact that he was a firm supporter of public broadcasting was undoubtedly a bit of gravy. Not all actors are Jack Nicholson, w/50,000,000 off the back end of BATMAN. Some of us are Raul Julia, in 1984, drawing a paycheck, and hoping our talent will show through, and elevate a piece of crap like OATMB.

Third, MST 3000. OK, granted, they had nothing to do with the making of this film. But, they took an unwatchable (while well intentioned)film, and turned it into an incredibly enjoyable film. And they were nice (as they reasonably could be) to Raul.

As I've stated before, there is a special place in my heart for Overdrawn At The Memory Bank - it's similiar to those Saturday afternoon WNET movies that I'd watch when I was either sick in bed or just plain bored and channel flipping. (The Tripods come to mind, for one.)

It's not strange that Raul Julia, an ardent public television advocate who lived in New York, would do it. The question of why and how it came about is, though.

For one, the movie was part of a series of science fiction productions by WNET in 1985, all adapted from short stories and novels. The people who produced Overdrawn At The Memory Bank also produced The Lathe of Heaven for PBS in 1979 as well. After The Lathe of Heaven, they had planned to produce a series of science fictions films, though they only got to do Overdrawn afterward. You can read an interview with them here: http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue162/interview.html .

As stated before, Overdrawn was one of three films in a series, which also included Kurt Vonnegut's "Between Time and Timbuktu". The movie was deliberately shot on video so they could include the digital effects. Considering the budget given, the visual effects were actually effective, if a bit psychedelic.

Raul Julia does do a very good job acting in this movie - someone on an MST3K site said he looked "embarrassed". Hardly. He actually sold the part pretty well. Incidentally, PBS had the rights to both Animals Are Beautiful People and Casablanca, which is why they made good use of both. The movie was shot in Toronto, and most of the actors are from there - so blame Canada if you must.

(Incidentally, Animals Are Beautiful People is the funniest (and oftentimes sad and touching) animal documentaries you're likely to find, earning an Oscar nomination and directed by James Uys, who also did the classic The Gods Must Be Crazy.)

The woman who plays Appolonia James, Linda Griffiths, also did a very successful one woman show in Toronto as well -http://www.aislesay.com/ONT-ALIEN.html - based on the life of Gwendolyn MacEwen called Alien Creature: A Visitation From Gwendolyn MacEwen. She also has had steady work since Overdrawn, too.

In the end,is Overdrawn At The Memory Bank a bad film? Maybe. MST3K fodder? Oh, most definitely. However, for me, it brings back happy memories of childhood, and there is one quality that makes it better than most seen even in Hollywood flicks:

Everyone seems to be having a GOOD TIME making the film. They're having FUN. Donald Moore in particular (who plays Walenda Irving, the huge chairman of the board) is having a hammy ball with the material. Unfortunately, after Overdrawn, he only did Blue Velvet then passed away.

I realize this is a bad movie. But I like it. It's incomprehensible, features some rather insulting Casablanca references (as the MST3K cast said, never put a good movie in your bad movie), and frankly it's astonishing that it contained so many good actors. (Really! Raul Julia stars, and there are also a lot of very talented character actors who basically sleepwalk through their parts in this movie. Goodness knows how they were talked into doing it.)

The direction is practically nonexistent. I'm convinced the actors are making up the blocking on their own. The cinematography is terrible, except in the stock footage of African wildlife used for Fingel's dopple. And the whole thing reeks of the kind of "social commentary" fiction I used to write when I was in ninth grade. (Wretched stuff, really.) MST3K really is the best venue for this film, even if the fat jokes got a bit old.

Nevertheless, I have a soft spot in my heart for this movie. When I was little, this movie was shown on the local PBS station. I must've been nine or ten, and for years I only remembered tiny snippets -- a glowing cube, somebody going into a computer and making it snow indoors, and, of course, my first introduction to "Casablanca." My brother, who couldn't have been more than 7, was my only corroboration for having seen this movie because he remembered it too, twelve years later when I mentioned it over dinner after watching "Casablanca."

And so began my crusade to find this movie. All I knew was that it had a floating cube, a shootout in a restaurant resembling Rick's "Cafe Americain," indoor snow, and a scene where a schoolchild almost spilled mustard on a man's exposed brain.

It wasn't until my junior year of college that I found it, in the sci-fi section of the Northfield Video Update. I watched it, and was astonished at how amateurish the movie was. It was fun to see Raul Julia, who had recently passed on, and I decided that the movie was intensely cheezy, probably disliked by most (and with good reason), but that it had it's own particular charms. I do have a soft spot for cheeze, after all.

So it was with great joy that I discovered MST3K was doing the movie. Sadly, I kept missing that episode. This year, I finally managed to catch it via timed record. And it was worth the wait. It's a pretty typical MST3K episode, but for me nothing can dim the charm of this crazy film. It's a bad movie, make no mistake there. The actors mostly seem embarrassed to be in it and are working without the benefit of direction. The script is putrid. The music is hilariously bad. The general effect is only slightly less comprehensible than the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" segment at the end of "2001." But I still like it, for some inexplicable reason.

As a footnote, I saw "Total Recall" a few years before I finally rediscovered this movie. Although I could not remember much of "Overdrawn" at the time, "Total Recall" still brought back memories and left me with the nagging feeling that I had seem the same thing done better sometime previously. Strange how the memory cheats. Maybe I've become overdrawn at the memory bank myself!