Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television
I’m trying to remember if I saw the entirety of The Lawnmower Man before this recent watch. I distinctly remember parts of it, but there was also at least one game based on the movie released, so my memories may come from there. It’s also a case of one of the most interesting lawsuits ever filed regarding a movie. We’re told that this is Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man, but King won a multimillion dollar lawsuit to have his name removed from the film since it has virtually nothing to do with the short story he wrote. His story was about a lawncare service run by a satyr who used lawn mowing as a sort of sacrifice to Pan. The movie is a version of “Flowers for Algernon” involving a guy who mows lawns and the emerging technology of virtual reality.
So where do I begin with this ridiculousness? We’re introduced to Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan), who is working in the VR world. Specifically, he is experimenting with psychoactive drugs in chimps, putting them into VR simulations and attempting to enhance their cognitive abilities. Over time, we learn that despite Angelo’s intent to use this technology for things like Alzheimer’s research, the project is actually being run but The Shop, the fictional branch of the government that exists in several Stephen King works (The Dead Zone and Firestarter come to mind). Of course, they have military goals for this, and a new strain of drugs has had adverse reactions on the chimps. Angelo decides on his own to start over and recruits Jobe (Jeff Fahey), the intellectually simple groundskeeper in his area. Angelo and Jobe start to experiment, and Jobe adapts quickly to virtual reality and his cognitive abilities grow.
