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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Sixteen Tongues (1999)


The story goes as following: in an S&M hotel, where walls are full of porn ads and the TV screens show porn the whole time, unless you pay to turn the television off, stay 3 different people, who all must deal with their problems. The first is Adrian, a cop who was severely injured in a blast. His skin was replaced with the material from the tongues of 16 people (there's your title). Because of this he can literally taste his own clothes and everything he touches. The second is a female hacker, Alik, who's constantly accessing the Web in search for information. But, not with a computer. She hardwires herself into the system at a price. Third - Alik's lover, the assassin Ginny. She must deal with the urge to kill and with the artificial clitorises that are situated under both eyelids making her orgasm every time she blinks.
Doesn't this sound like a fantastic flick??? Doesn't it? Yeah, it ain't. Sure, I understand that we are talking about a flick with a limited budget, but that doesn't forgive some major problems. If you're gonna make a flick with sex as one of the drives of the film then it's time to make a porno. That is the one thing that might have set this flick above the rest. And I don't mean the boring porn of today. I mean intertwine an interesting storyline, which this movie has with some harcore. This is failure point number one.
The assassin chick, Ginny, is very cool and pretty damned hot. That works.
The whole thing looks like it was shot in a hallway of a shitty apartment building in New York. The interesting part; the various rooms of decadence were shown briefly and should have been explored a little more to give some depth to the environment.
Having people pay for everything from using the water to turning off the television was a bizarre lift from Phillip K. Dick's superior novel UBIK. I did like that the ice machine proclaimed that the ice was made of 92% water. Very funny.
In the end, the movie doesn't take the risks it needs to be a truly unforgettable film. This makes it a waste of time and I hope that I saved some people some time with this blast from the recent past.

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