In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, it’s her former bedtime movie The Lawnmower Man; a bewildering 1992 fable with Biblical themes and insanely dated CGI.
The Lawnmower Man
In the darkest period of my life (so far!), The Lawnmower Man was an essential lullaby to me: the thing I’d put on when I’d staggered home from an outing, some chemical or other keeping me from settling into sleep. Gotta be the director’s cut, too, which runs for a snooze-inducing 142 minutes to the theatrical version’s 108, and opens with a chimpanzee slaying evil corporate drones with a pistol. The perfect cinematic downer and hallucinogen all at once.
The movie was originally called Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man, despite King’s original, fantastical short story being warped beyond recognition when combined with director Brett Leonard’s original project ‘Cyber God’. King sued the production to get his name left out of the psychedelic, unintentionally hilarious end result, but perhaps he was just jealous of The Lawnmower Man’s unique vision of existential horror. There’s no screen adaptation of King’s work that achieves anything as terrible and jaw-dropping as this movie’s sex scene—more on that later.
The Lawnmower Man is a kind of pre-Matrix, post-William Gibson take on Flowers for Algernon; Daniel Keyes’ story of a simple-minded janitor who triples his IQ via an experimental yet degenerative procedure, sampling the peak of human intellect before side effects cause him to cruelly crash back to mediocrity. Here, that lab rat is the significantly-named Jobe (Jeff Fahey), a real Simple Jack type guy whose only purpose in life is summed up by the maintenance man gig of the film’s title.
Where the Biblical Job was tested by God’s slings and arrows, this Jobe gets a divine gift from Pierce Brosnan’s Dr Angelo (Angelo = Angel! Wow!), basically becoming a god in the accursed process. Brosnan wears a wee little gold earring in the film, and plays his scientist as a pretentious dickhead. Fahey looks exactly like Trey Parker, and wears a yellow-jumper-blue-overalls ensemble that makes him look like a demented Minions cosplayer. Both are impossible to take seriously.
Even less credible is Brosnan’s brain-boosting technology. It involves the recipient strapping themselves into an embarrassing, full-body haptic gyroscope contraction and a VR headset, allowing them to subliminally absorb complex learnings as they whizz around in KidPix-level environments of bouncing orbs and undulating, hypercolour skies. It’s the perfect, ridiculous Windows 2000 screensaver to bliss out to, but it must be said that Fahey conveys his character’s evolution through the process in an alarmingly expressive way. His face and vocabulary changes with each ride in the dumb machine; like Adam, he’s now vulnerable to adult emotions like shame, understanding deepening in his unsettlingly blue eyes. He inexplicably becomes ripped, and begins to feel sexual desire, something his childlike former mind had never considered. Oh boy—here’s where we get into that unforgettable scene of coitus in the virtual realm.
Wanting to share the love in more ways than one, Jobe sneaks his love interest Marnie (Jenny Wright) into Angelo’s lab, and the pair whorl around in a laughable computer-generated void, their faceless avatars bumpin’ and grindin’. They meld into one another, morphing into a conjoined dragonfly: hot! It all goes horribly wrong when Jobe reveals that he’s now advanced enough to cut out the middleman of foreplay; he can read Marnie’s mind, and “knows what [she] really wants”…for him to transform into a lamprey-mouthed alien critter, and spew alien mystery goo onto her flailing virtual body. This experience is so existentially devastating—or perhaps, reality-shatteringly orgasmic?—to Marnie that it melts her brain, leaving her no more than a slack and speechless body hanging limply in Angelo’s rig. I don’t mean to kinkshame but it’s one of the most upsetting things I’ve ever seen.
From there, Jobe’s guilt spirals into godlike madness. He wields his post-human digital powers as a weapon against Angelo’s bosses at Virtual Space Industries—a god in the machine raging against the machine—including taking out the Director, an awful Dean Norris performance delivered with an embarrassing half-British accent. By the time The Lawnmower Man reaches its bonkers climax, with both Brosnan and Fahey represented by shiny mannequin-esque figures in an eye-bleeding CGI chamber, I know it’s time to go to bed. I even programmed this movie at the end of a long Halloween movie marathon, and it handily swept most of the lingering guests out the door once the time had come. Put that in your lawn and mow it.
