{"id":2615,"date":"2015-04-30T11:44:43","date_gmt":"2015-04-30T11:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/?p=2615"},"modified":"2015-06-03T01:39:09","modified_gmt":"2015-06-03T01:39:09","slug":"the-lawnmower-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/?p=2615","title":{"rendered":"The Lawnmower Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lawnmower Man<\/strong><\/a> ~ 1992, Brett Leonard, USA<\/p>\n

\"MV5BMTk2ODExODIwM15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODUyMDY0MDE@__V1_SY1000_CR22,0,630,1000_AL_\"<\/p>\n

The Lawnmower Man<\/em><\/strong> is a far out early 90’s\u00a0horror film which boldly\u00a0jumps into the once exciting world of VIRTUAL REALITY.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Remember when\u00a0people were excited by Virtual Reality<\/strong>, or VR<\/strong>, if you’re hip? You probably don’t, because holy shit, that was decades ago… but no matter,\u00a0circa 1992, the people of Pre-Myspace Earth\u00a0really thought that\u00a0Virtual Reality was gonna\u00a0be super\u00a0awesome, and they also thought,\u00a0hilariously enough, that\u00a0the technology needed\u00a0was practically within our grasp. Let me set the stage for you; at that time, The Super Nintendo was straight up blowing people’s minds. Trying to perfectly replicate an interactive universe inside a digital\u00a0environment\u00a0back in the early 90\u2019s was sort of like trying to travel to the moon when mankind was just starting to figure out how boats work. Today,\u00a0pretty much every bozo on the street\u00a0carries in their pocket a\u00a0device which would have\u00a0left 1992’s most jaw dropping technology in the dust, and we routinely drop the damn things\u00a0into the toilet.\u00a0The certainty with which The Lawnmower Man<\/em> addresses it’s techno-speculation really makes watching it feel like coming upon a photograph of something really embarrassing you did in high school, only this time, the embarrassment impacts Western Civilization as a whole. Man. We sure were stupid back then, huh? Yes, and we still are.<\/p>\n

The Plot~<\/strong> Pierce Brosnan plays Dr. Lawrence Angelo, a cool 90\u2019s scientist who has a pierced ear. Angelo is really smart, and his work is super important. What is his work, you ask? Pretty much he just straps monkeys into those weird gyroscopic things you used to see at\u00a0the county fair and\u00a0makes them play Atari Jaguar on stupid Virtual Reality headsets all day. For some reason, he thinks that this will\u00a0stimulate the growth of brain tissue,\u00a0which would thereby prove\u00a0that video games actually make you smarter. Hard sell, Angelo, I think that by simply logging into X-Box Live we can pretty much disprove that little theory once and for all, but regardless, that’s what he\u00a0does, until\u00a0his work hits a road block when his test\u00a0monkey loses it\u2019s shit and attacks some people, who in turn, blow its little monkey head right off. Seeing how distraught Angelo has become after this regrettable setback, his black-hearted employers decide to\u00a0send him home\u00a0on a paid sabbatical, so he can chill the hell\u00a0out and avoid losing his marbles altogether. They were foolish, though, to think that the ever obsessive Dr. Angelo would ever\u00a0halt his research simply because it was proven to drive his subjects into fits of mindless, violent fury. On the contrary, having just now seen how potentially dangerous these experiments really are, Angelo does the one thing a scientist worth his salt would ever do, and that is to move directly into human trials without the oversight of any regulatory agency whatsoever. He does this in his basement, using a mentally retarded and possibly sexually\u00a0abused man who mows his lawn. What ethics?<\/p>\n

Jobe, the titular lawnmower man, responds well to his time in virtual reality land, and his intelligence does begin to improve. Enthused by his success, Angelo brings his findings to his employers, who are delighted, and Angelo is\u00a0again allowed to continue his work in their vastly superior facilities. However, without telling Angelo,\u00a0they also alter the programming for Jobe\u2019s VR sessions to include the same aggression based programming that had previously\u00a0driven Dr. Angelo\u2019s chimpanzee insane, because scientists just like to do that kind of stuff sometimes. As a result, the now genius level Jobe not only gains godlike super-powers, but also vengeful, homicidal tendencies. That, boys and girls, is how Pierce Brosnan turned Simple Jack into a god-like Super Murderer with powers that rival the mighty Sega Genesis. Quiver in fear!!<\/p>\n

\"LawnmowerMan1-JobeReality\"<\/p>\n

No idea what this is supposed to be.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Lawnmower Man’s<\/em> strategy is pretty clear; it wants to wow you. This movie wants to throw so many awesome, pixelated,\u00a0computer generated effects at you that your head’ll\u00a0just be spinning with disbelief. Unfortunately,\u00a0today\u00a0we find the picture absolutely\u00a0defanged, declawed, neutered, and humiliated by time. Bubsy 3D<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, anyone?\u00a0I’m sure that what Lawnmower Man<\/em> brought to the table may have\u00a0spun a\u00a0head or two\u00a0back\u00a0in the early ’90s, but\u00a0for today’s viewers, every single aspect of the film’s main attraction comes across as primitive, and embarrassing. It’s actually somehow\u00a0worse than what you see in the “Atom-Age’ B-movies of the 1950’s, because at least\u00a0most of us haven’t actually dabbled in atomic fission firsthand, but we damn sure\u00a0know about playing video games. That’s a\u00a0fact.\u00a0The Lawnmower Man<\/em> NEEDS to be futuristic, it NEEDS to be impressive, and it NEEDS to convince you that your freaking Nintendo 3DS might be giving you super powers slowly. If it fails to achieve these goals, then what you have is a movie that\u00a0burdens itself\u00a0with an impossible obstacle,\u00a0and therefore simply cannot be taken seriously.\u00a0It is for that reason that The Lawnmower Man<\/em> is probably the most dated film I have ever seen.<\/p>\n

It’s also sort of\u00a0sort of offensive, and isn’t directed all that well…\u00a0BUT….\u00a0at the end of the day, none of what bothers me about The Lawnmower Man<\/em> is going to be enough to detour it’s potential fan base completely. This is a film about a man who murders people with what basically amounts to “Computer Magic,” and there will always be people who want to see that. Hell,\u00a0the general\u00a0criteria for what makes a horror film passable to\u00a0mainstream horror culture\u00a0is pretty damn lenient, and The Lawnmower Man<\/em> clears most of\u00a0those hurdles just fine. From an academic perspective, what he have here is a turkey, straight\u00a0up, but\u00a0The Lawnmover Man<\/em> is somehow\u00a0enjoyable on some\u00a0primitive\u00a0level, and I guess that’s better than nothing.<\/p>\n

C-<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The Lawnmower Man ~ 1992, Brett Leonard, USA The Lawnmower Man is a far out early 90’s\u00a0horror film which boldly\u00a0jumps into the once exciting world of VIRTUAL REALITY. Remember when\u00a0people were excited by Virtual Reality, or VR, if you’re hip? You probably don’t, because holy shit, that was decades ago… but no matter,\u00a0circa 1992, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1173,946,1178,1171,1179,149,1177,1172,1176,1092,1175,1174],"class_list":["post-2615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-science","tag-946","tag-atari-jaguar","tag-brett-leonard","tag-bubsy-3d","tag-c","tag-super-nintendo","tag-the-lawnmower-man","tag-the-shame-that-was-1990s-cinema","tag-usa","tag-virtual-reality","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2615"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4116,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2615\/revisions\/4116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}