Teknolust

Have you ever seen a movie that was so insipid, so banal, such an piece of utter gobshite that it left you angry and confused? A movie that rubs you wrong leaving you feeling it was really pretending to be a work of genre cinema but in reality was a tractate cant for some -ism or another? A movie that you blessedly managed to forget until someone innocently mentioned it forcing all those ghastly memories of enduring such tripe to suddenly flood back to the fore of your conscious mind?

That, my friends, happened to me recently. The movie? The movie was Teknolust. But the joke was on me. You see I had no idea I felt this way about the movie. No joke. I was happy having forgotten ever suffering through any portion of this miserable scat. This movie was so awful that. . . Well this was my reaction to a post about it in a movie forum recently: "Having giant bug eyed demonoid alien nazi hell spawn inject the festering puss from the anus of a dead chupacabras filled with fecal ecoli bacteria directly into your eyeballs would be better than watching this!"

Ouch!

Needless to say I did not realize what a psyche scarring experience this movie had been. Someone mentioned this movie and a hate bomb that this celluloid charlatan injected into my subconscious like a fifth column sapper went off. The director of this instant brain mash took what sounded like an awesome premise, the sort of premise that an Al Adamson would have run wild with and made a phenomenal piece of low budget exploitation sleaze or Roger Corman would have run through his cheeze grater camp factory and produced titillating but fun trash, and turned it into tedious soul sucking feckless insipidity.

What makes it all the worse is the movie stars Tilda Swinton (Female Perversions) who seems a rather decent actress, which makes one wonder what possessed her to star in this. Probably it was the idea of exercising her acting ability by playing four distinct roles, each being offshoot reflections of the same central character. That's right she plays the main character and her three clones.

Sounds like a promising science fiction movie so far, right?

That's what I thought, too. Alas this is not science fiction. Rather this plays out like an exploration of neurosis masked by some confused radical agenda masquerading as science fiction. The key character is so wrapped up in her personal psychosis that subjective reality seems to have become little more than a papier-mâché caricature. Too afraid to venture out into the real world for fear of tearing the paper she creates a virtual kindergarten fantasy world within the confined laboratory of her bewilderment.

Enter the clones, each being a clichéd representation of various fixations, none of which are very interesting nor entertainingly explored. Then again I'm not sure this movie was ever meant to be entertaining. (Thus my comparisson to Roger Corman and Al Adamson above are probably unfair. They, at least, were trying to produce entertainment.) It's obviously a "message" sort of movie. That message being: Women are awesome and ultra kewl leet! Men are vile creatures to be despised and pitied! GRRL POWER!!!

But what really annoys me isn't that this was a propaganda movie about an -ism dressed up in the garb of genre cinema. The director merely took the best tricks of the exploitation trade, namely fooling the audience with a sham shell game to lure in the punters. No, that's not what bothers me. What annoys me is this was such a tediously repulsive bore that the mere memory of it, low these many years later, fills me with the hatred of a thousand dying suns. If that's what the director was going for then good on her she worked her black magic ninja mind-fu with her movie. Now, please, let's not ever speak of this movie again.
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PSST. Curious if the movie is really all that bad or wondering if I was just having a bad day when I saw it? You can buy it at Amazon and judge for yourself: