Worst thing you’ll see all week: Cypher

Posted by on September 28, 2011 in Movies

I have watched and enjoyed some awful movies solely because Lucy Liu is in them. Cypher is one such movie. This 2002 release is director Vincenzo Natali’s transition from the sleek sci-fi horror of 1997′s Cube to the awkward Cronenberg me-too of 2009′s Splice. Jeremy Northam plays the dupe in a mind-bending game of corporate espionage that ends up exactly where you think it’s going to end up. Liu plays Morpheus, but hotter. She even gives Northam red pills. She will arrive dangling from a wire on a helicopter for a hilarious Liu ex machina.

Northam, a capable and British actor, sports an oddly brittle American accent. Liu, a lovely woman, sports a ridiculous unflattering wig. If Cypher is ever rewarding, it’s when these things are shed.

  • Zach

    I thought Splice was awesome!  It was definitely an awkward Cronenberg me-too, but it was also the best American horror movie I saw in 2010; I might be forgetting something, but a Cronenberg me-too is better than almost every horror movie getting produced these days. 

    Speaking of me-too’s, how about the “Fourth Kind”, I saw it this summer and LOVED it.  Every step along the way I thought it was going to take a turn for the worst… and it never did!  Without spoiling, I thought it was amazing how it took quirky fringe source material and made it horrifying and much more real and interesting than the material it was drawing from.  Rotten Tomatoes score of like 26% though, which I find astounding.  It may have been a “Blair-Witch” rip-off and a bit formally pretentious (which I thought worked really well except for one scene), but I think it really stood its ground. 

  • Anonymous

    Zach, it sounds like you and I have very different taste.  I didn’t care for Splice or Fourth Kind.  In fact, I have a special loathing for the meta layers in Fourth Kind. And I really hate how the studio (Paramount?) banked their publicity for that movie on insisting it was real, even to the point that they didn’t credit the actors.  That was really tacky, in my opinion, particularly since the main actress did such a good job.

  • Zach

    Ah, I had no idea.  I missed it when it came out.  So I didn’t take it as a gag but a really savvy take on a new genre.  In other words, I understood immediately it was fiction.  That seemed to really skew the critics as well.

    “Ancient Astronauts” is on its 3rd season now?

  • http://twitter.com/frankstendal Frank Stendal

    Still, Lucy Liu…

  • Anonymous

    Exactly.

  • Anonymous

    Cypher is listed as “Brainstorm” on IMDb in case someone would be looking for more info.