EXISTENZ (1999)
Starring Jennifer Jason-Leigh and Jude Law
It was great to see Cronenberg finally make a Cronenberg movie again. After boring us to death with two art films—"Naked Lunch" and "Crash"—the Canadian splattermeister finally returned to form with this science fiction film as reminiscent of "Videodrome" as it is of "The Matrix," a similar movie released the same year.
Jason-Leigh plays a world-famous game programmer of the future, when people literally plug their consciousnesses into computerized games, totally immersing themselves into an alternative reality. A group of revolutionaries, bent on bringing the world away from the addictive virtual reality games, is bent on killing her. The games are played via "pods," which are part synthetic, part living tissue and are attached to user's spinal chords through an embiblical chord-like connector. Other Cronenberg-esque highlights of the film include a gun made out of animal tissue that fires human teeth.
Although not one of Cronenberg's best, it nonetheless was a vast improvement over such drivel as "Crash" (basically an overly intellectual sex film). Well worth catching, even if it seems a little derivative of the director's past work, most notably "Videodrome," with its talk of the "new flesh."