822-Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

Film Year:  1983
Genre:  Science Fiction
Director:  Douglas Williams
Starring:  Raul Julia, Linda Griffiths, Wanda Cannon, Donald C. Moore
MST Season:  8

The Movie

With television usage shifting to internet and streaming, even the major networks at struggling to maintain a footing in relevance nowadays.  I can’t imagine how public television is faring, with cheaper, more quaint programing that largely depends on crowd funding to maintain itself.

If this is the crap they show on public television, then maybe it deserves to die.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is a strange POS...er, I mean PBS movie about the distant future, where a man named Aram Fingal (played by the late Raul Julia) who slaves away bored in front of a computer monitor wishing for something better in life.  He hacks his way further into the system where he finds a library of “cinemas” to watch, including the enduring classic Casablanca.  Obviously appreciation of the arts cannot be tolerated and Fingal is taken into psychoanalysis.  Instead of ridding his love of cinemas by showing him Meet the Spartans, they decide to do the far more expensive process of tapping into his brain and “doppel” him into a virtual body of a baboon...because, why not?  But when they lose his body in the bureaucracy and his mind becomes trapped in a virtual world of his own creation.

Nonsensical and confusing, I have to wonder if any of this story made sense to the people who were making it.  While it would be easy to give the film a pass in its inanity because of it’s low budget and lacking production values, that might be giving the film more credit than it’s due because of how unpleasant it is to watch.

Fingal is a jerk.  There, I said it.  The film asks us to relate to him because he hates his job and wishes he were doing something else.  The problem is most of us get bored at our jobs, but we push our way through them.  Fingal finds a way to waste his company’s time when he should be productive and acts like a droll asshole when he gets caught, and rolls his eyes at authority acting as if he is in the right for what he did.  Granted, they treat his act of watching cinemas as that of a crazy man (which is bizarre) and they never really circle the points they should be making against him, but he’s not an innocent in this film.  As we get deeper into the film and he starts creating a virtual world around him, he takes advantage of the situation and acts out his wildest fantasies.  This is all well and good, but one of the first things he does is sleep with a woman that wouldn’t give him the time of day on the outside, claims he’s bored with her, then tosses her to sidelines.  Yes, they’re REALLY winning us over with this main character.  I don’t feel a sense of satisfaction when he wins the day at the end because I don’t like him.

Incidentally, my spell check in writing this review keeps trying to autocorrect the name “Fingal” into “fungal.”  I’m very tempted to not correct it at all.

The film’s plotting doesn’t really help the film either.  Fingal’s body is lost because of a class field trip has children running around in these advanced labs and touch everything.  The child in question that causes the mix-up spends his time groping a busty brain dead woman, calls the lab assistant a “retard,” and throws around the catch phrase “Is it...sexy?” (with all respect to Crow, this is the quote of the episode and not “You know you want me, baby!”).  As far as plot devices go, it’s very unpleasant and not as funny as the film thinks it is.  Once Fingal is in the the system, he tries to screw the corporation from the inside because...meh, it’s something to do?  He seems to have a desire to antagonize and bring a villain into the movie by choice, because the movie wouldn’t really have one if he wasn’t acting like an ass just to be an ass.  All of this and apparently this film is supposed to take place in a matter of weeks (...I...think…) yet is edited as if it all happens in the span of an afternoon.

Are there any good things about the production?  I will say that while Fingal is a vile character, Raul Julia plays him as well as you can ask for.  The female lead, Linda Griffiths, is charismatic and shares a screen chemistry with him as well.  And while it tends to be an eyesore at times, the fact that this movie was shot on videotape and utilizes primitive pixelated computer graphics almost gives the film a comforting retro vibe that is somewhat charming.  But pointing these out is like picking digestible pieces of food out of a garbage can.

Look, watching these movies through Mystery Science Theater we fans find ourselves at a disadvantage because sometimes it’s difficult to follow both the movie and the riffing at the same time.  Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is more complicated than most films on the series, and asking to understand it while seeing it through this lens of a show is something of a disservice to it.  Unfortunately when I do understand the movie, I find that I dislike it.  At least when I’m confused I can just drift through it without giving a damn about it.

The Episode

If there’s anything that can be said about this movie it’s that it’s all over the place, and wherever it goes Mike and the Bots never seem to be caught off-guard by it.  When the movie gets crazy, they’re the first to point it out.  When the concept of doppeling is introduced and Fingal is transported into the body of an ape, Crow sarcastically jabs “Surely this will cure him of his love of cinemas!”  They do love to play with this movie’s logic, even going as far to nitpick that the actress playing Fingal’s mother isn’t even the same ethnicity as him.  However their favorite aspect of the film is the villain, which the film simply dubs “Fat Man.”  At first, they play up the fact that this guy bears a passing resemblance to TV’s Frank (making MSTies around the world squee with joy), but once the movie starts acknowledging the character’s girth it’s just what they’re waiting for.  Every fat joke they can think of is now on the table, making references to constant hunger as well as endless burping and fart noises.  Public television is also mercilessly mocked, pointing out the film’s rather strangely apathetic and sexual nature for such stations (“Kids are just tuning in to watch Barney…”).  They end on a high note, calling the film’s “tech support,” where they desire answers to the many burning questions of the film.

Public television mockery bleeds into the host segments, in which Pearl is faking a public television station and hosting a pledge drive to get suckers to send free money in.  Exactly who she is broadcasting to isn’t clear, since last we heard they were stuck in Roman times, however it’s pretty common knowledge that the crew didn’t have much interest in the “lost in time and space” story arc and it seems fitting it just dwindles off in the season finale.  The Public Pearl segments are a joy, with the standout being Pearl and Observer’s “Loving Lover’s Love” song.  Other segments don’t quite stand out, as Mike tries to calm a chimp, Servo doppels into the Nanite world, and Crow sells T-shirts of his catchphrase “You know you want me, baby!”

Personally I prefer Mike’s catchphrase:  “We’re a out of toner!”

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is the low point of the season film-wise, but really ends the season on a high note with the laughs.  While personally I don’t rank it as nearly as good as the three all-star episodes that preceded it, it’s definitely an quality episode of the series.

Good

The DVD

Rhino doppeled Overdrawn at the Memory Bank into their Volume 4 collection.  Video and audio were both solid, and the only extra was an intro by Mike where he doesn’t quite say anything that substantial about the episode.

The episode was re-released by Shout Factory in a reissue of Volume 4.  Video and audio were exactly the same, and the intro by Mike is retained.