junk-monkey I often watch movies that make no sense in which characters keep doing stupid things that make no sense for them to do merely to keep the plot going ("Do NOT ever go into that cellar!), or built on premises that defy most known logic to start with (The Giant Claw springs to mind for some reason) but Darkdrive really does make no sense. It starts out by looking like it is going to make sense - in an incredibly clunky, by the numbers clichéd manner; the first act is almost a paint-by-numbers assemblage of stock action thriller lines - but by the end all semblance of logic had been thrown out of the window and driven away to the local dump.At the start of the movie our hero is a whizz-kid programmer working for a morally dubious corporation who runs the penal system of the future by digitising villains into a virtual prison - called guess what? 'The Matrix' - and 'terminating' the bodies. By the end of the movie he is trapped in the self same virtual reality prison with his dead wife and a little girl who had a couple of lines at the start of the show, caught in some endless looping mashup of Groundhog Day / Existenz / Overdrawn at the Memory Bank but with more guns and swearing. The hero meets himself and turns out to be the baddie as well. Though how he got there before he got there to find himself is never explained. In fact no one knows why anyone is in there - or indeed how they got there (Mrs Hero for instance was blown up by a booby-trapped picnic hamper in the middle of a field*, nowhere near the brazzillion tons of special effects - OK, a chair and an arc lamp - needed to get her husband Tronned). It almost becomes hypnotically wonderful, as if David Lynch had directed Time Cop. (A feeling heightened by great chunks of the music which was as near to being Laura's Theme from Twin Peaks as you could get without being sued.) I may watch it again.* Never, EVER! tell your husband you're pregnant just after he's walked out on an Evil Corporation.

jim goodwin I agree that the plot is incomprehensible, but it takes you on a weird trip that can be fun. The music is worth the price of admission. The love theme was inspired, as was the entire score, by Eraserhead. It's a bit of a cross between Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalimente. Hey, I'm not even Italian; I just love those guys. I put on the soundtrack around the house sometimes just to get into a trippy vibe. The later at night the better. I wrote this music right after Distorted Reality (composer tool) came out, and the score is a showcase of the DR samples. The true gem here is the vocal by Giancarlo. We had a great time writing and recording that song. Honestly, this is the best music I ever wrote for a film. Check it out!

mathewignash A weird tale of a guy sent into a virtual reality penal colony, where he finds his dead wife singing in a night club, fights Alti from Xena, and tries and fails miserably to be a noir matrix wanna be, without the plot, special effects, or acting. One bright note is an appearance of pre-Buffy The Vampire Slayer Julie Benz, who gets killed several times and has a love scene, and a unexplained kid by the end. So it's a lot like her character of Darla. We even get to see Julie totally topless for her love scene, but sadly they voice over exposition while she sings in the night club. I'd have prefered to hear her sing.

jtur88 I don't see enough of this genre to properly make any comparisons, but this film certainly had very little analytical thought behind the script. It takes place in some future when people are all driving black 97 Ford minivans, but penal reform has reached the point at which prisoners are banished to a virtual reality, furnished with, among other things, abandoned Pintos and Vegas, as well as the other prisoners in a similar plight. The banishment, of course, is accompanied by sustained, blinding flashes of intense white light. The general story line is told through closeups of computer screens the flash up-dating messages like "Transformation Complete" and "Program Compromised". The film abounds with non-sequiturs, which I suppose is de-rigeur in a world where the final outcome cannot possibly have any link to the premise. Needless to say, it has its standard complement of beautiful babes, and Claire Stansfield is kinda cool.I get 25 cable movie channels, and this was the best thing on at not-quite-bedtime, so I guess it wasn't that bad.