Ghost in the Machine

Ghost in the Machine is a horror movie set in Cleveland. Already I'm scared. The movie's monster lurks in computers. Now I'm terrified. Even worse, he's capable of running up your phone bill with calls to 900 numbers. AAAAHHHHH!!!!!

Despite all this mayhem, Ghost in the Machine starts out as a bucolic tale about an electronic repair guy who just happens to moonlight as a mad dog serial killer. They call him the Address Book Killer, because he steals address books, then murders everyone who's listed in them.

One day, Nancy Allen comes into his shop and accidentally leaves her address book. The killer is instantly smitten by her (you can tell by the way he keeps sniffing at her addresses). But while speeding to her house to slaughter Allen and her teenage son, he smashes up all over the freeway.

Now, this is the tricky part. He's rushed to the hospital and placed inside a Cat Scan. Lightning strikes the main power lines and there's a massive power surge. The killer dies just as his brain wave patterns are being processed by the computer during the surge. The killer's now "inside" the computer and is interfaced to the Datanet system. (I hope you were taking notes on this. A quiz may appear later in this review.)

Allen's life suddenly becomes a living nightmare. She discovers that her phone bill has been jacked up, her bank account has been shut down and her friends are being bumped off. Her life as a single mother of a teenage son (read: it's already nightmarish)has just taken a turn for the worse. (And she's still in Cleveland.)

That's when she meets Chris Mulkey, a chain-smoking computer hacker on the side of goodness. Unfortunately, he's not on the side of fashion or personal hygiene, but Allen is in no position to be picky about the company she keeps.

Ghost in the Machine's main claim to fame is that it was directed by Rachel Talalay, the director who scored some minor critical notice for Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (on Elm Street, that is). She has a strong visual style, but no apparent grasp of narrative logic. Her sense of pacing is nothing to write home about, either.

But these weaknesses won't bother the movie's audience. During the screening of Ghost in the Machine, I sat behind three teenagers who kept playfully slugging each other in the head through the whole flick. There really is too much violence in the cinema.