Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Bart_Mancuso The story if you look at it from a broader perspective really isn't that bad. But when you put it under a microscope it meets every definition of the word absurd. They plug a guy into the matrix, er I mean the HX-368 or whatever and has to live his life as a freedom fighter named Neo, err I mean a monkey named Daisy. Then he has to help an oppressed culture called the Na'vi who are a peaceful and primitive people, I mean... he gets stuck inside an interactive simulation called the Matrix...what? Actually what I am trying to say is that Overdrawn at the memory bank on its surface is really not all that retarded when you look at it when compared to stories like the Matrix and Avatar.It's just that Overdrawn at the memory bank's writers decided to not clue us in on anything to have the story make any sense! Why is Fingal going to die if he doesn't get out of the Matrix--I mean the HX-368! How exactly does Fingal manage to interface the computer by reversing the access code!? What does this all mean? Why should we care? These answers unfortunately are not ever answered. The writers wanted to portray a 1984-esque future without any explanation for anything that's going on, and that makes the story pretty lame... just like Avatar. Oh, and for some reason in the future everyone hates anteaters.

Greg Eichelberger Film was produced by WNET in New York, with post-production work done in Canada (it figures). In the undetermined future, Aram Fingal (the late Raul Julia-"The Addams Family," "Kiss of the Spider Woman," "The Burning Season") is a data processor for the gigantic Novicorp Corporation, who, after being caught watching a much better movie -"Casablanca" - on company time, is forced to submit to a mental rehabilitation (called "doppling" here). At the Nirvana Center (a large mall), he meets rehab programmer, Apollonia James (Linda Griffiths), who eventually becomes his tepid love interest. As he is "doppled" into the brain of a baboon (a series of stock footage with Julia's lame voice overs adds to the unintentional hilarity), a stupid kid on a tour switches his identification tag with a corpse. Why a group of unruly moppets are allowed to run free in an operating roam is never answered, by the way.Meanwhile, Fingal, with the assistance of plot holes that Dom DeLuise could fit through, creates his own fantasy world based upon the classic, Academy-Award-winning 1942 film starring himself as Rick as played by Humphrey Bogart, Griffiths as Elsa (portrayed 350 million light years better by Ingrid Bergman), and Louis Negin as a prissy and annoying Peter Lorre knock-off. The Chairman of Novicorp, "The Chairman" (Donald C. Moore) also joins in the fun as "The Fat Man," as if anyone cares. A confusing series of events is not left well enough alone as the ending clears up nothing, as the plot of "Berlin Alexanderplotz" was more coherent. And what was the point of the whole cube thing; the "I've Interfaced!" baloney, the poorly-conceived masturbation scene; as well as the spinning electron Julias, anyway? As bad as the writing and acting (Julia is twice as bad in a dual role and Griffith spends most of the time staring at a computer screen), however, it's the not-so-special effects that drop this turkey a few feet below sewer level. Ultra-cheap graphics conjure up images of Pong, Wang Computers, the video by The Buggles, and the season they videotaped episodes of "The Twilight Zone." State-of-the-art technology it's not, and today, high school kids can design better looking graphics on the Macs. These not-so special effects make the juvenile work in 1980's "Puma Man" seem like Pixar animation.Film also tries to tell us that ridiculous names such as Aram, Apollonia, Crull Spier, Emmaline Ozmondo and Geddy Arbeid, will be commonplace. An unforgivably bad motion picture on every level.

shuvcat-1 Actually, the core concept at the center of OATMB is a good one: in an future fascist society, one "creative thinker" is punished for his "subversive" follies-- watching old Hollywood films-- by being given "rehabilitative" treatment-- being sent on vacation in the brain of a baboon. By a deus ex machina (the establishment misplaces his brain) he gets the chance to mess around with the computer that controls the world (including the weather and the financial system) and eventually brings down the head brain in charge of it all. It wants to be a more optimistic version of "Harrison Bergeron", basically.And it fails horribly. It's the textbook example of a good idea that was handled by deeply inept people (kind of like FEMA). Much speculation has been made over how they got Raul Julia to star in this thing. I'm guessing he read a (very early) first draft of the script, thought it was a great idea, signed on, then couldn't get out. The end result is like a staging of "Hamlet" by a troupe of high school freshmen-- which MST3K also got a hold of, by all accounts.And as far as all the slams against the use of video vs. film-- get over it. Everything PBS showed in the 80's was filmed on video, as I recall.

Diana Whoof. I have now watched this movie six times, and am finally coming to terms with what little plot there actually is. Large parts of this horrible, lame PBS production make no sense at all, making you wonder if the writers were smoking something heavy while adapting this script from the short story.Basically, we have Aram Fingal(Raul Julia, from Puerto Rico, no less! Aram Fingal?) a low on the totem pole computer programmer who is so bored with his job at a huge, world spanning corporation that he spends his time watching forbidden 'cinemas'(although really just Casablanca) at work. His supervisor, annoyed at his lack of output, sends him to a 'psychist' to get mentally adjusted(as Tom Servo comments"so aging lesbian nuns rule the future?") She sends him to a place called Nirvana Village to be 'doppled'. This involves having his identity put into a glowing Borg Christmas ornament, and then being transferred into an animal's mind in their wild animal park so that he can experience life through new eyes. Not only is this a rather stupid concept, but this will cure him of his love of cinemas how? It's his boring job that was causing him to break into the cinema bus master in the first place. Being a baboon for two days isn't going to accomplish anything except to teach him how to fling his own filth at his supervisor.Something goes wrong with Fingal's dopple, and the techs(including the ridiculously named Appollonia James-I love some of the names in this movie) discover that a child on a field trip has switched the tag on Fingal's body so that it didn't go to the sleep room but somewhere else. So they have to find it, and in the meantime they dump Fingal's personality into a huge computer.Here's where the movie becomes particularly senseless. Fingal creates his own reality in the computer, spends half his time trying to reprogram it for some reason, and the rest hanging out at a bad simulation of Rick's Place from Casablanca. The Novicorp chairman, a rolled pork roast in a sweat stained white suit, follows him around in the computer threatening him because he keeps reprogramming the computer from the inside. I was never sure WHY he was doing this, as all it seemed to accomplish was making the fat guy mad. But, oh well. There's a tense moment or two at the end(I guess) where Apollonia is trying frantically to rescue Fingal's personality(that is, of course ,assuming he has one) after the cube that held it is destroyed. Fingal is put back into his newly found body, and declares that he's going to fight the system. Frankly, the system didn't seem all that Big Brother-ish, so all the hoopla over it just seemed kind of silly. But then, that was the essence of this film-silly, and confusing. PBS, you have a lot to answer for.