****
I blind bought this at Fry's because it was a scant $5.88 for the DVD and, wow, I'm glad I did. I absolutly ate this movie up. The inevitable question "What's it about?" is a hard question to answer without giving a lot away, but you can draw a lot of parallels between this film and The Matrix which was made one year later, only, as cool as the Matrix was, I think in some ways this is an even better film.
The film takes place entirely within a city (which is indeed dark) where mysterious pale creatures that wear fedoras known as Strangers fly around and use their telepathic powers to alter reality (no, seriously). If you watch The Venture Brothers on Adult Swim, the guys roaming around the courthouse that Brock calls Strangers in the Trail of the Monarch episode are taken right from this movie.
As the movie opens, we see a man awaken in his bathtub to find a dead woman in his apartment. He is frightened and confused, and realizes that he has no memory of who he is. He recieves a phone call from a strange man telling him that he'd been expiramented on. The man turns out to be a goofy looking psychiatrist who walks with a limp, played by Keifer Sutherland. He is the human assistant of the Strangers, helping them in expiraments on such subjects as the protagonist. As part of the entire process, every night at midnight, every human in the city loses conciousness and time seemingly freezes and the Strangers combine their power to reorganize the city. Buildings appear and disappear and different people wind up in different places, but when they regain conciousness the next day they don't seem to find anything out of place. In one instance, a newsstand is run by one man one night and a different man the next, though the second man claims he's worked there for 25 years. The Strangers run into a problem when John, the protagonist, stays awake during the "tuning" as they call it.
The bulk of the film follows John as he tries to reconnect his past, while at the same time learning bits and pieces regarding the nature and purpose of what it is that the Strangers do. There is a subplot with a detective, played by William Hurt, as he tries to solve the murder in John's apartment and several others with the same pattern. Hurt's character is straight out of the 40's detective movie tradition, like Maltiese Falcon, and many of the visuals are out of the same ilk. The city is very gothic looking, a little bit like the Tim Burton Batman films, and it takes on a life of its own, both literally as the Strangers alter it every night, and figuratively in a countless amount of imaginative shots. About every 30 seconds there was something visually that jumped out at me that made me say "Oh, that's cool." The film is only 90 minutes long, but it seems like they packed about 3 hours worth of shots into the movie somehow and they're all great to look at. The movie supposedly is very similar to Metropolis, which I haven't seen, but I have seen M, by the same director, and I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of M in this movie as well.
Basically, if you're looking for something to watch, go out and buy this movie. For 6 bucks it's hard to really go wrong with this.
