Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1984)

hyped garbage

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is a terrible movie, but I don't consider it one of the worst movies I've ever seen or one of the worst featured on MST3K. It does at least have Raul Julia, a hugely talented actor who died much too early, who was charming and had some good comic timing. Unfortunately Julia's performance is the only thing that rises above adequate level, the rest is a mess. Everybody else in the cast seem to be going through the motions and look embarrassed with Linda Griffiths pretty much oblivious to everything going on around her and the Peter Lorre knock-off only managed in being annoying. They had next to nothing to work with though, with the characters ranging from trite to stupid, useless also in a couple of cases. And the script filled with childish unfunny humour, catchphrases that don't make any sense and don't get any kind of explanation, vomit-inducingly inane exchanges between characters and stilted and barely comprehensible technical jargon. The story is very confusingly told, the idea was interesting but executed in a way that made it very difficult to follow. Technically, even in this regard Overdrawn at the Memory Bank manages to fail. The special effects/computer images are slapdash at best and really look as though they were made on the cheap, to the extent that makes everything else visually a chore to watch in all honesty. To conclude, terrible but there's worse around in my opinion. 2/10 Bethany Cox

This movie is pretty bad, however this movie is one of my all time favorite episodes of MST3K. What is really surprising is some of the actors that did this movie, Raul was one, but my wife was the one who spotted a very young Gary Farmer as the role of Toobey, a man who has appeared in classics like smoke signals and pow wow highway. I often wonder if the producer and director as well as Raul Julia and Gary Farmer ever seen the episode of MST3K where they butcher their work, and I often wonder what their reaction might have been had they seen it with the robots and Mike making wise cracks at the script. I have probably watched it at least a hundred times and if your curious about seeing this movie, see it with Mike Crow and Servo.

Give a 7th grader a video camera, $200,000, and some stock footage from a PBS nature film and he'd come up with this movie (on a bad day).Start with this promising premise: a lazy worker watches movies on his computer (OK, I do this myself sometimes) and is therefore punished appropriately. He's forced to possess the body of a baboon for "compulsory rehab," which will obviously make him want to be a good worker. During the baboon possession, his consciousness must be stored in cube of topaz. The strict protocols followed by the brain surgeon includes letting children wander in and out of the sterile operating room. Naturally one of the brats swaps the tag on our hero with another patient, causing his body to go to the wrong area of what appears to be a medical strip mall run by Gabe Kotter's sweat hogs. While the hero (played by Gomez Adams) is monkeying around, a red alert emergency occurs -- an elephant tries to knock the baboon out of a tree! All hands on deck! This of course leads to a situation in which his consciousness has to be put into the world's most powerful computer (it controls the weather, tells people when to go to bed, and stores old movies among other things) for safe-keeping until they find his body. So far, the movie hasn't been too weird. Sort of a cross between 1984, The Matrix, and especially Tron, minus any plot, acting, or decent music. But then the quality droops when he starts turning the real world into Casablanca by imagining himself to be in the movie. To stop him, the CEO of Novicorp (a cross between Microsoft and The Soviet Union) jumps into the computer and chases him around, threatens him, bribes him to be good, and finally decides to kill him. The tension gets too much to bear when they have the big showdown. The CEO and the hero have a 5 minute staring contest in Rick's Place. The climax comes when the hero causes a spastic virtual lava lamp to cling to the CEO, which I believe means he wins, although that is quite unclear. This is one of those movies that makes you pine for the movie police to come and pistol whip the director. Which is what Mystery Science Theater 3000 does with extreme comedic effect.

I actually got a headache from watching this film. I can't remember the last time that I felt that bad from watching a show. I won't even explain this move because you have to experience the pure nausea inducing movie to truly discover why life is so precious. I doubted everything, even the existence of myself, after about three minutes of this film. I don't remember much of the end. Just that it hurt. What I do remember involves a mysterious woman in a clam, a matrix like premise, doopling, cinemas, The guy who played in the Adams Family, a love story, A fat man, a bartender, and a headache. Just thinking about this makes me want to vomit. DOOPLING!