Dir: Nico Mastorakis
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Jeffery Dean, Nicollette Sheridan, Huey Lewis

Have to say, I had been dreading this one. For this is the lowest rated of all the Kinski performances on the IMDb, scoring a woeful 2.7 out of ten. But I finally bit the bullet, sitting down to watch it. And dear god, it’s awful. I think 2.7 might be an over-estimate. Of course, its main problem is the subject matter: if you position your film on the bleeding edge of technology, there’s a very good chance it’s not going to date well. This has certainly not stood the test of fifteen years, right from the flashing sign in the opening credits, “Have modem, will travel.” I couldn’t honestly tell you the last time I connected my computer to a modem.

Similarly, the central aspect of the Internet round which this revolves is chat rooms. Totally text-based, mind you, not Facetime, Chatroulette or whatever, and so something which feels positively Neolithic. Partly to get round the tedium which would result from a film where you’re watching the lead character type messages on their keyboard, they give the heroine, Sondra (Kinski), a voice-to-text converter, and the comments of everyone else in the chat room are also read out in bleepy electronic voices. Her sister, Misty (Sheridan), is not so lucky, so she engages in that other cinematic conceit: people who speak aloud whatever they’re typing. Not something I do either.

Things do not improve once you get past this. Sondra, in a wheelchair after some leg-injuring incident that is never explained, is left alone to occupy her hi-tech, voice-activated house, when her husband, Ben (Roger Daltrey, for some inexplicable reason – if you’ve read this far, you’ll know this isn’t even the most questionable rock star cast in the film) goes off on a business trip. Poking around his computer, she guesses his password and discovers Ben has been cheating on her in cyberspace. She goes into the same room, meets his virtual mistress, but also gets into a flame war with some troll, who decides to show her who’s boss, by killing the mistress and sending Sondra a video of the event.

Misty has come over for a visit, and the two try to send the video on to the FBI, but it’s encrypted – which apparently means, it turns into a cartoon animation of Frankenstein, among other creatures. Not that Sondra knows what “encrypted” means, and has to have that laboriously explained to her by Agent Matheson (Lewis. Yep, that one, who with his News gave us the pop classic, The Power of Love. While not his first foray into acting, this was pretty close to his last, the IMDb listing only a minor role in 2007’s Graduation thereafter). To crack the file, they call in a computer tech – only for this to end up being the madman (Dean), whom they have now brought inside the house.

I could go on at much greater length about all the subsequent stupidity which unfolds, such as Sondra believing that she can over-ride the house’s voice-activated security systems by yelling “Shut up and do it!” at the computer. In the interests of brevity, suffice to say it all ends up with the Goethe-spouting psycho wearing night-vision goggles, and Sondra trying to blind him with a camera-flash, a shameless rip-off of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (the opening, meanwhile is a Psycho rip-off, from the killer’s perspective, with a side order of Peeping Tom). To the script’s slight credit, the characters do at least acknowledge this – except it then continues on to stage its own, far more ludicrous alternative. If you’re not snorting derisively when you figure out what’s happening, you’re a far more easily-pleased viewer than I.

Every character in this film is unutterably dumb, with the possible exception of Ben, since he leaves after five minutes – but given how easily Sondra guesses the password he has used for the “American Love Online” website, he likely is not the smartest tool in the box either. But the film exists purely due to this stupidity: if the victim, killer or even the cops possessed everyday smarts, the movie would be done and dusted inside 20 minutes. It doesn’t help that the killer actually appears to be two people, one a hacker, the other the actual psycho. The former straps lights to his fingers, wears far too much eye-liner, and keeps jars of fetuses in his apartment. He may be the more normal one of the pair.

I lost track of the number of occasions I realized I had given up paying attention at all to the film, and had to rewind it back to where I had drifted off. Probably eight or nine, at least. About the only scene that makes any impact is one where Matheson is speaking to another agent, and she does a surprisingly accurate description of what would, a few years down the line, be known broadly as the Dark Web. Everywhere else, the film propagates a depiction of technology which is about on a par with the depiction of marijuana found in Reefer Madness. Oh, and B-movie queen Julie Strain turns up briefly as an exotic dancer. She may be the only cast member who should not be embarrassed by this.

Kinski was also given a co-associate producer credit here, and I really hope this was some kind of honorary or courtesy title. Because if she was actively involved, in any significant way, in the creation of this, rather than simply being a player for hire, then her culpability in the wretched results becomes a great deal higher. For quite where the supposed $11 million budget went, is almost impossible to say. Director Mastorakis (shown above with his lead actress) described his relationship with Kinski as “equivalent to chewing razor blades,” but I’m inclined to treat his opinions somewhat skeptically, since he also said of the movie, “This is a classical thriller. Even Internet-illiterate people will understand this story.”

The problem is, Internet-literate people – almost everyone these days – will find it cringe-inducingly terrible instead. Here’s a three-minute version of the film put together by the good folks at Everything Is Terrible! It should provide more than enough evidence to allow you to appreciate why the film’s position at the very bottom of the Kinski barrel, is entirely warranted.