eXistenZ (1999)

After 17 years of making his brilliant ‘Videodrome’, David Cronenberg made a kind of sequel where television is replaced with semi-organic game pods where jack is inserted into players’ spinal bio-ports to induce all-too-real hallucinations. Even after a long gap Cronenberg is back to his original freaky & weird screenplay writing. His vile & degenerating graphics often seems too irritating for general audience but that’s where his ‘auteur stamp’ lies. I remember few days ago I gave ‘Videodrome’ & ‘Naked Lunch’ to one of my routine horror loving colleague and he all of sudden deny me letting him recommend any films!!!

During launching seminar of new experimental game called ‘eXistenZ’, a game designing goddess Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) was shot by a rival gaming company’s hired man with a strange gun where human teeth are loaded instead of bullets. She gets a help from a marketing trainee guy named Ted (Jude Law) and to help her he also entered into the weird gaming world. Gaming here is a gateway to liberate from daily stereotyped pathetic reality of life to the world of surreal existence. But once you are into the game, one just hates back to reality; now you are stuck to, addicted to virtual reality. Whatever is real seems unreal and boring now. On one hand the whole plot seems quite humbug and on the other I was just thinking about all those PSP and PC game addicted gizmo lovers. The movie is very puzzling one but this time I just hate the end part. It’s more seems like set up to contrive & baffle the viewers unnecessarily with unknown jargons and graphic images. And above all it’s all mixture of his early films like ‘The Fly’, ‘Naked Lunch’ & off course ‘Videodrome’. Performance wise too, the film is so weak. There’re so many loopholes here why it didn’t strike me much.

But excluding this flaws; Cronenberg has again created a world full of unthinkable grotesque horror on screen and he absolutely deserves ‘the master cap of disgusting horror’. Watch the scenes of Trout farm where gamers are ripping apart mutated amphibians and reptiles and eating the dishes full of them, watch the vile gun made by some unspeakable things. Nobody except Cronenberg can imagine, create & show you something so grotesquely distortorting.

Ratings-6.5/10