THE IMPOSTOR review

For the past couple of nights I’ve been in far off Austin shooting a goofy cameo in a movie that I have no idea who is in or who is directing. It was a bodybuilder movie called NO PAIN NO GAIN and I don’t know if it is serious, good, funny or what. I just know that my line was "A bodybuilding movie will never sell," while an oiled up bodybuilding midget flexed his asscheeks in a tiger-striped g-string as the sumo wrestler cavorted with the 44ddd corseted lady as the druidic magician hurled flame as the snake woman hissed at an accountant while someone else bragged about winning the "William Shatner Award for Excellence."

So tonight when Father Geek presented me with the option of going out to see IN THE BEDROOM or THE IMPOSTOR. Now, I know this doesn’t seem like it should be much of a choice. Phillip K Dick versus some critic adored Oscar-touted drama/thriller thing. Now I’m dying to see IN THE BEDROOM, but not after the last two nights. Tonight I wanted something cheap and cheesy. I wanted a film I could sink my teeth into and rip apart and spit out. I felt like a bad science fiction flick. Tomorrow I figure I’ll watch IN THE BEDROOM. Tonight… tonight was something I could laugh at and just get plain goofy with. Tonight was THE IMPOSTOR.

Now, I didn’t want this to be a bad movie. The word that has been coming in from critics and filmgoers all over the world was that this was just about a disaster of epic proportions. I love my Phillip K Dick fiction. Usually no matter how bad the adaptation comes out, quite a bit of the genius that is P.K.D. is intact in some form or another. The script had a whole host of screenwriters going at it, and they aren’t necessarily chumps either. In fact, I out and out like most of them.

Scott Rosenberg (HIGH FIDELITY), Ehren Krueger (ARLINGTON ROAD) and David Twohy (THE FUGITIVE). Sure they have all been a part of some not so great stuff too, but I liked something from all of them.

The director was Gary Fleder of KISS THE GIRLS and DON’T SAY A WORD fame or infamy depending on your take. The movies certainly were not great, but they were passable works of entertainment at the very least. Personally I thought both films were competent pieces of fluff that were ultimately unsatisfying, but nothing ungodly terrible.

Then there was the cast. This was a nice group of supporting actors that I genuinely look forward to in film. Gary Sinise, Madeleine (pant pant drool drool) Stowe, Vincent D’Onofrio, Tony Shalhoub, Mekhi Phifer and the god that walks this Earth known as Tracey Walter!!!

Certainly not the cast of OCEAN’S ELEVEN, but ya know…. That could be a good thing.

We arrived at the theater… an empty theater… not a soul in the screening room besides Father Geek and myself. We’re laughing about our utter stupidity for being at this screening, but we were hoping that maybe… just maybe the movie would be so awful that we would laugh and have fun with it. Maybe it’d be one of those just utterly incompetent laugh riots of badness.

I’d heard about this one nearly turning to vinegar it’d been in the can so long. I’d heard that Dimension had toyed with it, cutting and cutting and bringing in special scissors and iffy glue.

When the movie started there were maybe 5 other folks in the place, when it was over one exclaimed, "And the Oscar doesn’t go to…" to a smattering of giggles.

The problem with this film is that it is not ungodly terrible. The problem is I like quite a bit of it. The other problem is that a monkey edited this thing to be a piece of crap. The effects are handled by effects companies from ILM to MetroLight to Netter Digital to some place called Computer Café. The quality of those effects differs greatly. The opening of the film has some space stuff that is so bad, so terrible that you might want to just walk away when you see it, suddenly there are some beautiful perfect cityscape stuff, then terrible force-bubble stuff, then a couple of cool effects then more bad effects.

In-between all of this inconsistency was some pretty fun work by Sinise, Stowe and Phifer, but everyone else was just terrible. Most of the action scenes are total nonsense. Somebody involved in the making of the film loved tons and tons of blurry edits… meaning fast cuts of indeterminable imagery. People out of focus, racking in focus cut to out of focus face getting larger but out of focus seemingly shot in super 8mm at times from the terrible grain.

So basically you have an incompetently assembled film based on a pretty good script, jerked around by someone or some company that tried to shoot an ambitious and quality science fiction script with the wrong budget and by farming effects out to every which company in the land.

The story is pure Phillip K Dick. A man is suddenly a fugitive being accused of being a genetically created android-replicant thing with a bomb that comes together molecularly when near his target sent by an alien world that has been warring with Earth for generations. Gary Sinise must find out the truth, try to stay alive and find his wife. Does he have a bomb in his chest? Is he METALLO? Well only by doing the time in the theater will you get the answer. If you don’t mind a few pokes with molten hot needles in your eyes from time to time… you’ll learn the truth. If you want to see it, I recommend not reading the Talk Backs below… but know that overall this is a mediocre flick.

I sat there watching this thing thinking… what if this exact same script was in say Ridley Scott’s hands over at New Line or Warner Brothers or Universal or anywhere that wouldn’t of tried to lowball the script. Hell, I even liked almost all of the cast, it isn’t their fault that the film looked like crap with chocolate fudge icing around the peanuts.

This is like a 1950’s science fiction comic book drawn by one of those bad comic companies that managed to get a damn good story. I sit there sifting through the panels, listening to the story and trying to imagine what it would look like drawn by Wally Wood and printed with a Feldstein cover. Unfortunately… this is a 10 cent comic that will never gain any value or substance over time. Only heads bowed, shaking back and forth wishing for what might have been.

You look at something like this and you just thank God that Miramax and Dimension let Peter Jackson and LORD OF THE RINGS go. Dear God. Whew…