ELECTRIC DREAMS - doesn't hold up well

According to IMDBPro, Virginia Madsen is trying to remake the 1984 rom-com classic, ELECTRIC DREAMS. It’s a film I remember fondly my childhood, if only for the sound-track featuring Boy George and Heaven 17, but so hazy was my memory that I hadn’t realised that it starred Virgina Madsen or, indeed, the chap who went on to play Harry Smith in TWIN PEAKS. Back in the early 80s computers were new and exciting and oh so slightly threatening. The idea that a computer could malfunction, grow sentient and attempt to sabotage it’s geeky owner’s relationship with his new musician girlfriend was an easy sell. Rewatching the film today, it looks and feels hopelessly dated. The synthesiser music and computer screen visuals are pre-historic. The romantic dialogue between Madsen and Lenny von Dohlen is hackneyed – and seems to come from a more innocent age before social networking and speed dating. And most damning, the movie is shot almost as a series of pop videos – unsurprising given that its director, Steve Barron, didn’t direct another movie until 1990’s TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, but segued into music videos, notably Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. I rather wish I hadn’t revisited the film but had left it as a fond memory of early 80s excitement of a high-tech future. Steve Barron didn't direct another movie till TMNT in 1990 but did film legendary music videos like Billie Jean.

ELECTRIC DREAMS was released in 1984 and is available on DVD.

TEETH - fascinating, if mis-marketed

So everybody told me TEETH was a wicked satire of those dogmatic American evangelical Christian teens who make a cult out of biological ignorance and chastity. And I suppose the movie does start off as a comedy, but instead of a knowing, witty satire, it was more dead-pan and goofy. We meet a pretty teenage girl called Dawn and she's lecturing kids to keep it in their pants, right up to the point where she meets a sensitive Christian boy called Tobey. We get some quietly funny, goofy scenes in which they try and play down the obvious sexual tension, and it all ends with them making out. At which point, Dawn's mutated body puts up a rapier-like defense as her vagina dentata do for Tobey's manhood, and indeed, his sorry little life.

Now, I expected this scene to be played for broad laughs, and it's true that there is a lame attempt at gross-out comedy. But my overwhelming emotion for most of TEETH was pity. I think this is because Jess Weixler, who plays Dawn, is such a good actress and plays it so straight, that I actually began to sympathise with her. After all, she's a genuinely nice kid, who is learning that she's a mutant, and having to cope with a mother who's terminally ill and a psycho-sexually fucked up brother at the same time. In the scene where she finally enjoys sexual pleasure I was seriously happy for her!

So, while I did laugh out loud a lot during TEETH, I actually found it far more emotionally rewarding than, say, SEVERANCE. But I didn't quite get a handle on what writer-director Mithell Liechtenstein was trying to say. He starts by mocking the Christian teens for their distorted picture of sexual relations but in the end doesn't he present something equally warped, and alarmingly close to the fundamentalist view that teenage girls need to be protected from the predatory sexual instincts of teenage boys?

TEETH played Sundance, Berlin and Frightfest 2007. It was released earlier in 2008 in the US, Singapore, France and Hong Kong and is currently on release in the UK.