Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1984)

the audience applauded

Good movie but grossly overrated

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I've shown this film to friends WITHOUT the MST3K commentary and they LOVED IT!!! There was a time when I watched this film over and over because I was so addicted to it.Raul Julia really carries this film. His acting is charming and fun and it's probably my favorite performance by him! Yes the special effects are campy and the computer art is cheap but that only makes it better and more hilarious :)The perfect made-for-TV camp Sci-Fi movie. I really love what people are able to accomplish with a little imagination on a budget, and I also love the cheap 80's vision of the future that makes me want to visit.Love love love! This film also makes me want to read the short story it came from.Seriously, I really love this movie and so do many of my friends :) PS. I like the MST3K version as well, but one of the reasons it's such a great episode is because this film already stands on it's own.

To the reviewer who misquoted MST3K as saying Mr. Julia looked embarrassed -no, they said he should have been embarrassed as should all of the other participants. Nearly half of the movie was the rather bland but inoffensive heroine sitting around with her hand to her ear. The totalitarian aspects amount to a fairly normal prohibition of using company time/computers for personal use and a "required" doppel vacation. This world is too clean for a dystopia and too poorly run for an effectively threatening technarchy. Why are developmentally-challenged technicians employed to keep the doppler's bodies in their right places? Why are snotty school children allowed to visit such a potentially disastrous location? Only so that the otherwise laughably puny plot can develop. I have seen many a stink bomb in my time including Carnival of Souls and Red Zone Cuba but even they weren't as hollow and boring as this "cinema."

I loved Overdrawn at the Memory Bank simply because MST3000 did a wonderful job bashing the movie. Fingal (Raul Julia) is some Casablanca junkie who gets "doppled" into a body of a monkey for compulsory prophylactic rehab when his body becomes tampered with by a demonic child, sending him for a sex change operation instead! This somehow causes an energy surge in which Fingal stops dabbling in dopples and becomes trapped into the supercomputer HX368. He then uses his wit and cunning to make it through his self-perpetuated reenactment of Casablanca and to become interfaced with the HX368. All the while the computer which holds Fingals' memories and conscious are on the verge of being obliterated by the short shelf life of doppling cubes. I don't recommend buying this movie unless of course it is Volume 4 of MST3000 DVD set. I liked it for it's humor and weird filming effects. The whole movie is filmed like a dream sequence, with a slight haze around the lenses of the cameras.

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???