May 30, 2018

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

To listen/download, click here!


Ah, Public Television, where would we be without you? You were there when we were kids, with your Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. And you stick by us until we die, what with your opera concerts and shows like American Playhouse.

And it is one of those American Playhouse episodes that Derek and Larry sat down to watch this time around--a little flick from 1983 called Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, starring Raul Julia and literally nobody else that you might recognize.

Seriously...Who are these people?
(Side note: There are almost no pics of this movie that are not from MST3K.)
Aram Fingal (Julia) is bored at work. Work, in this particular case, is a giant mega-corporation that controls a portion of the world, including its weather, and is run by a tubby guy known only as the Chairman (Donald Moore).

Fingal likes to kill time at work ogling his coworker, Felicia (Wanda Cannon) and watching "cinemas"--films from the past that are now, for some reason, illegal. When he gets caught watching Casablanca, he is sent to see a psychist (Helen Carscallen), who determines that what Fingal really needs is to have his consciousness vacuumed out of his head and stuffed into a Disco Cube (not the actual term used), so she prescribes a mandatory "doppel". (This movie is filled with ridiculous terminology in an attempt to make it sound futuristic.)

But to get you in the Disco Cube, they have to saw off the top of your head
and install 5.1 surround sound.
When he gets to the clinic to have his brain wired, he meets Apollonia Jones (Linda Griffiths), a computech in charge of running doppels, although, as her voiceover informs us numerous times, this is her first time doing a mandatory one. This, apparently, will make it more difficult, for reasons that are never quite clear.

Once Fingal drinks some old Tang and they put him under the bandsaw, he is shipped off to the medico (Denise Pidgeon), a fumble-fingered Olive Oyl simulacrum who not only has to wire Fingal for doppeling, but also has to deal with a group of filthy schoolchildren who are being shown around the clinic by their teacher. One of the kids (Audra Williams) tries to put her mustard-covered fingers all over Fingal's brain, and another, a horrible little monster named Marco (Hadley Kay) uses the teacher's distraction to switch out the routing tags on some of the bodies in the room, including Fingal's, which identifies him as a doppel.

With his brain now wired to the Disco Cube, it is taken and plugged into a baboon in Africa named Daisy, giving Fingal control over the poor monkey, forcing it to do cartwheels and eat something called "maruba(?) fruit," which apparently get the animals drunk.

Later, while Fingal/Daisy is in a tree, trying to recover from a massive fruit-induced hangover, an elephant tries to knock over the tree, causing Fingal to freak out and try to end his doppel experience. Instead, he is sucked into a fake world similar to his own, created by Novicorp's mainframe computer.

But somehow even more uninteresting than his real world.
Apollonia makes contact with Fingal and tells him to just act normal. When that fails to work out for him, she tells him to make small changes so things aren't so mundane for him. Naturally, he decides that the best way to do that is to convince Felicia to let him bone her, only to discover that it wasn't as great as he imagined it would be, which kind of contradicts the whole premise, being as it all takes place in his imagination.

While this is going on, Apollonia is informed that Fingal's body has been misplaced, and she has to go speak to the Chairman about it. He wants to just forget about the whole thing, but Apollonia convinces him to let them find the body before the Disco Cube self-destructs in forty-eight hours, because they are apparently made of C-4 and scotch tape. The Chairman agrees after it is explained to him that letting a doppel die because they've misplaced the body could have a negative impact on profits.

But then how will I afford my gravy baths?!
Fingal, now completely insane, has combined the world of Casablanca with his own, resulting in a lot of sweaty people, a nightclub called "The Place", and a Humphrey Bogart character (also played by Julia) named Rick. Apollonia tries to intervene in weirder and weirder ways, showing up as Fingal's soup-delivering mother (Jackie Burroughs), and even coming down from the heavens as Eve to drop off the Ten Commandments of not fucking around with the computer simulation, but to no avail.

When Fingal starts messing with Novicorp's finances, the Chairman gets involved himself, appearing at The Place as The Fat Man. (Jake, as far as the guys can tell, was nowhere to be found.) He also tries to convince Fingal to knock it off, but uses a Telly Savalas lookalike to work as a bully for him.

Say there, handsome...Come here often?
As time runs down and the danger of disappearing completely escalates, Fingal keeps trying to figure out the password to Novicorp's computer so he can get himself out of there and get out of town. The Fat Man makes numerous offers, and even almost convinces Fingal to let it all go, but Rick convinces him otherwise, telling him he can bring down Novicorp and get his body back.

But will he? Will Fingal figure out the password and save himself before his Disco Cube explodes? Or will the Fat Man die of a heart attack before he can take out Fingal? Why was Apolonia's coworker, Djamilla (Chapelle Jaffe), licking her watch? If Apollonia was supposed to stay in constant contact with Fingal, why does she keep dropping out on a disturbingly regular basis? WHAT THE HELL DOES "I AM INTERFACE" MEAN?!

You'll have to tune in to find out!

Derek is angry about so much of this movie, but he is happy to acknowledge the one shining light in this train wreck of a film: The enigmatic and fascinating Tooby (Gary Farmer), a medico assistant who appears to have suffered some sort of internal head trauma, but still maintains his professional life. Good for him!

Larry was the one who wanted to watch this one soooooo bad. And now he is regretting that choice. He had only seen the MST3K version until now, and although he loved it on that show, he is nowhere near as happy with the unriffed version. He promises that he will never watch this monstrosity of a film again.

So drink your Reconst, get ready to Fingal your Doppel, and tune in to this week's episode!

No comments:

Post a Comment