Have You Seen "eXistenZ"?

Woe is the sci-fi action film, made with sheer originality, that happened to come out in April of 1999 and also happened to not be named "The Matrix." Mainly I'm looking at you "Thirteenth Floor" and you, too, "eXistenZ."

This past weekend Corrie and I saw the bizarrely yellow poster-avatar to David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" on Netflix. Holding what looks like a handgun is a very young Jude Law; he seems to be protecting Jennifer Jason Leigh. The title sparked memories, but fleeting. After doing some research I realized that it was because of when it was released that I whatever memories I had, or motivations to see it, were so fleeting.

It was basically released a week after "The Matrix", the live-action anime movie that changed the action-film vocabulary from that point forward. There are camera angles seen during yesterday's Super Bowl that exist because of "The Matrix."

Anyway, reading the synopsis was also when I learned that David Cronenberg was the director. You know you're in for something whacky with him involved.

That tidbit pushed us over the edge. We settled in and hit play.

Holy cow! I was not prepared for the gore and overt sexuality brought to the table. There is no gratuitous sex in the movie, but a whole lot of sexuality.

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a virtual reality game designer who is sharing her hotly awaited game with an eager group of gamers. Okay, I said to myself, as they all seemed to be connected with umbilical cords and fingering what looked like hairless vaginas with nipples.

Have you seen this movie? That's what the controllers look like: weird vaginal lap-animals with tits and nipples. To "play" the game, players tweak the nipples and rub the pink, twitchy, "pod."

They call them pods; after a mishap with one, Ian Holm repairs it but it looks like an autopsy.

The controllers connect to the players using so-called umbys; you learn this as the movie unfolds. These umbys connect the vaginal-nipple-pod to the player's bio-port. The bio-port is a butthole sized hole about four inches above the belt line.

Besides the sexually rubbing of the pods, there are these awesome bio-ports, with lots of lubing and fingering and even some tonguing. Seriously.

The gore is equally explicit. At one point Jude Law's character, chocking up the desire to eat the specimen to "game logic", chows the meat off of some random animal carcass. By the looks of the bystanders, it is fetid at best. He uses the greasy and sinewy carcass to make an organic firearm, which is, upon closer examination, the handgun from the poster-avatar. It shoots teeth; Jude loads with a tooth bridge that his character in "real life" didn't have.

That was how you knew it was part of the game. This movie is a set of nested realities that never lets the viewers get too comfortable. "Inception" is a spiritual offspring.

It made over $2.5 million at the box office, against a budget of $30 million.

Norm and I saw "The Matrix" at least three times in the theater, with Norm possibly closer to five times. The redefinition of the terms of action movies and the creation of a whole set of cliches that the Wachowski siblings augured swept movies like "eXistenZ" and "Thirteenth Floor" away from the collective consciousness.

The conversation had changed.

The "Thirteenth Floor" is up next...