Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

Canada / USA • 1983 • 83m •

• Directed by: Douglas Williams. • Starring: Linda Griffiths, Raul Julia, Donald Moore, Wanda Cannon, Helen Carscallen, Rex Hagon, Patrick Brymer, Chapelle Jaffe, Denise Pidgeon, Bunty Webb, Audra Williams, Hadley Kay, Gary Farmer. • Music by: John Tucker.

Aram Fingal is a very intelligent computer programmer and a very bored man in the employ of Novicorp, a mega-corporation that exists somewhere in the future. When caught watching "Casablanca" at his desk, Fingal is required to undergo rehabilitation therapy called "doppling." Doppled patients find their minds transferred into the bodies of animals for a new outlook on life. However, Fingal's body is misplaced and he is transferred into a computer while the body is located. With the help of Appolonia James, a medical technician played by Linda Griffiths, Fingal manages to reprogram himself into a simulation of Casablanca and eventually gains access to Novicorp's financial computers, bringing the company to its knees. But Fingal's real problem is getting back into his body before his memory patterns are erased.

Review:

Image from: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1983)

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for public broadcasting networks, as they have provided us with great things like Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow. But they've also unleashed much suffering and pain on the world--namely Barney, the Teletubbies, and this stinker of a made-for-TV movie starring (of all people) Raul Julia. It's been a long-held belief of mine that every renowned and talented actor has at least one quallified bomb on their resume, and this proves it.

We begin in your standard science-fiction dystopia, with the world apparently being run by large corporations while office drones work in endless tedeum--so far, not that different from today's workforce. Motion pictures (now called "cinemas" in one of the film's examples of Newspeak-Lite) have been outlawed, so people have to get their kicks by "doppling," or transfering their minds into animal hosts for a short time. Frankly I can see an upside to all this--give me the choice between a film by some second-rate SNL has-been and a couple days as a lioness, and there's no question which one I'd lean towards. But I digress.

Julia plays a fellow with the unlikely name of Aram Fingle. He's a data entry clerk so naturally he's bored to tears; it's impossible to be exited about data entry for a long period of time. Believe me, I've tried. So Fingle hacks into the closed "cinemas" file, gets caught, and gets sent to a rehab center where he's doppled into a baboon for no other reason than to use some stock footage from a nature show. Something goes wrong--what, it really doesn't matter--and Fingle ends up in some form of virtual reality simulation. A tech support drop-out named Appalonia James (what's with these names? Were all the ordinary ones like Jessica, Robert, and Taylor outlawed along with the movies?) keeps tabs on him from the outside, while the evil CEO of the corporation doesn't so much chew the scenery as make a five-course meal of it.

Meanwhile Fingle is creating his whole reality inside the computer, which largely consists of a low-rent version of "Casablanca" with Raul as Rick, Appalonia as Ilsa and the CEO as the Fat Man. There's also this guy in the Peter Lorre role who acts like he learned how to do Peter Lorre by watching the celebrity caracatures in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. Throw in something about Fingle hacking into the computer while inside it (a project that I imagine would take the average fifteen-year-old with a PC thirty minutes), a lot of techno-babble, some weird stuttering guy, and a computer that sounds like HAL in the same way that Joe Estevez looks something like Martin Sheen.

Confused? Good. You now know what it was like to experience "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank." My work here is done.

Review by divaclv from the Internet Movie Database.