Existenz (DVD)

David Cronenberg has long been acknowledged a master of the macabre, with a plethora of excellent films to his name, from classic horror films from the seventies and early-to-mid eighties (‘Scanners’, ‘The Brood’) to his later excursions into science fiction (‘The Fly’), the fantastic (‘Naked Lunch’) and less generic but no less unconventional work (‘Dead Ringers’, ‘Crash’). With ‘eXistenZ’, Cronenberg revisits science fiction again with a script penned by himself. Cruelly under-distributed theatrically, we now have the opportunity to view this excellent film on the similarly excellent ...  Read the complete review

Virtual reality has advanced in leaps and bounds over the past few years, evolving from a quaint theory expounded in a few science fiction pot-boilers to something very much real, and in the real world from a basically useless form of rather poor-quality game playing into a diverse subject area encompassing advanced entertainment systems as well as packages designed to perform more vital functions such as professional training in situations where other, more traditional forms of training might be either too dangerous or too expensive to consider. The very nature of this new art form, the fact that it subverts what is real and attempts to submerge the human ...  Read the complete review

It's actually a game within a game within a game....within limitless amounts of games.....Canadian director Cronenberg has produced some fine film-food-for-thought....including Crash, and The Dead Zone. Moving on from Videodrome, (a renowned art house film of the 80's confronting and warning about the dangers of television), he now does the same with the notion of Virtual Reality and game-playing......the result is a typically memorable experience, containing some imaginative features and which tries hard to produce a relevant, disorientating feeling of psychosis. He is an artist playing a game with the viewer, and with the idea of gaming. "You have to ...  Read the complete review

From David Cronenberg, the director of "The Fly", "The Dead Zone", "Videodrome" and "Scanners", comes this mind-cracking sci-fi weirdness. Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), world-renowned computer game designer, has just created and is about to release a whole new gaming experience known as 'eXistenZ', a virtual reality that might actually threaten the real world due to its almost seductive nature. The players attach themselves to the fleshy controller via a bio-port at the base of the spine with an umbilical-like cord, which sends them into a dreamlike state and into the virtual world. But an ...  Read the complete review

I was sitting down with my fiance dave yesterday and he was taking a look through my DVD collection as we are moving into our new house soon and he was trying to tell me that not all my DVD’s could be bought. Of course I told him they were all coming and then he pointed out eXistenZ that he thought looked rubbish. I told him to give it a go so we sat down and watched it and I for about the fifth time watching this film loved it again and here is why. ----- The Film: Some point in the future and people gather in a hall eager with excitement and anticipation. They are all there to test the newest and most real game that is not even on ...  Read the complete review