Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Jason (Steve Byers), Lee (Kathleen Robertson) and Alec (Matthew Edison) have a plan. Get stupid paid with their new hands free cell phone invention. But this just isn’t any old hands free cell phone my friends, no sir. Alec, the completely unsavory asshole inventor of this fancy new technology has invented a cell phone chip that you jab into your brain through your nose that allows the user to give simple voice commands or thought commands to make a phone call. There you go. Lee is the medical neurologist whose job it is to make sure that this contraption doesn’t leave any serious brain damage… note that as this movie ‘Static’ plays on it will become clear that Lee sucks at her job… and Jason is the handsome face of the company who will use his blonde hair and smooth tones to convince big companies to invest in this brain altering technology. He’s not very good at his job either.

So their first meeting with the Big Mega Cellphone Corp. goes all to hell, with a lot of this hellishness placed on the shoulders of Alec who is a completely intolerable asshole. If we haven’t mentioned that already. Now what? I know, how about some live human test trials? Lee knows a doctor who can use Alec’s handy dandy extra large brain probe to jab this chip into an available neural cortex which allow our heroes to test out this fancy new tech. Meanwhile, one of the principles of Big Mega Cellphone Corp., Bryce Linkletter (Darryn Lucio), is going over their prospectus again and I think he’s starting to like what he sees.

So these lunatics cram these chips into their brains and lo and behold… it works. ‘Chip On’ turns on your phone, think of a number and it dials, ‘Chip Off’ terminates the connection. I just don’t how they are going to text with this thing. Then the side effects start. Lee, for instance has the ability to read minds but the voices come from all over the place driving her insane. Alec has acquired the ability to control minds which has transformed a dude that was already intolerable into an intolerable raping murderer. For his part Jason has acquired the power to hear static. Talk about a raw deal.

The problem as it has presented itself is that the asshole murderous rapist is raping and murdering people with reckless abandon with his former friends Jason and Lee next on his hit list. Apparently the ability to control people’s minds is just way too cool and anybody who might be slightly aware of his awesome tech needs to die. Asshole.

‘Static’ or ‘Glitch’ or whatever those symbols in that ultra cool super misleading movie poster in the upper right hand corner of this page represents is not a very good movie. Directed by Randy Daudlin who also made the low budget creature feature ‘Bottom Feeders’, a movie I rather liked, but this little Canadian television movie not so much.

The movie starts off with a brief action sequence with the character of Jason getting abused by a cop and then rolls off into some highly stylized ‘Lawnmower Man’ type opening credit sequences but after that the movie slows… down. The majority of the film is setup so we can work our way back to that opening sequence where Jason is getting f’d up by this cop and its not so much that this setup is terrible or nonsensical, but its just not all that interesting or involving. Well, maybe someone in a backwoods shack jamming homemade electronics in your brain, at your personal request, is a little nonsensical but those chips had to get inside their respective brains somehow. We appreciated the character building side story aspects of Jason dealing with his screwed up family and Lee coping with her adulterous controlling father but these side stories just slowed down a movie that was already pretty darn slow to begin with.

I kind of thought the movie was going to go the route of Mega Corp turning down the sweet tech only to kill everyone while trying to steal the sweet tech but instead the film opted for a low bud ‘Scanners’ angle. I did like that approach but the execution of it was off, again moving way to slowly to completely involve the audience, and it also meant we had to deal with the character of Alec for the entire movie who I was secretly hoping would’ve been killed off early by the Mega Corp hoping to steal his fancy new technology. It was not to be.

‘Static’ isn’t a terrible movie by any means because it is well acted and the concepts driving the narrative, while wacky, were interesting, it just needed a shot of Red Bull or Five Hour Energy to accelerate things up a little bit.