This literally deserves a ‘what the hell did I just watch’ but in the pure way, not the ‘oh my god this was terrible’ way

Now just to say, this is a noir type thriller and a throwback to that Parallax View type of time or Stepford Wives where clues lead to clues that lead back to three clues before and your friend who’s been with you all the time is suddenly a hairbrush. Not your thing then you’ll hate this.

It’s all so mysterious, meeting up with people and chatting before re-capping the chatting with your friend who’s not a hairbrush yet

So I went in blind to this and expected a lame teen horror, well I was shocked.

Who knows ‘I Feel Fantastic’ ?

Did your brain go

“hey, hey, heyhey” and you shuddered?

If you did then you can skip the I Feel Fantastic Saga below, if not you need to click on it

click here for The I Feel Fantastic Saga

So this movie uses I Feel Fantastic singing lady as their template for the doll and mashes it with the infamous Max Headroom phreaker signal invasion which I won’t explain as everyone knows about it.

We happen upon James, he’s napping while at work as an archivist in Chicago. He takes old TV broadcasts and turns them into DVDs which was a thing in the late 90s and that’s when this movie is set.

He wakes up to the dead air noise, writes a note to his boss that he’s done his work. Packs the DVDs and sets off home.

James is widowed, having lost his wife, Hannah, three years ago presumably to suicide as, before work the next day, he attends a support group where everyone else has lost their spouse in that way.

While archiving at work he finds a news broadcast from 1987 was interrupted by a phreaker in a white mask blabbing gibberish over white noise, intrigued by this he takes the tape home and then at work the next day starts to troll the archives for news reports and other information about the phreaking.

He finds out there was another intrusion upon a show that’s meant to be Dr Who called Don Cronos (lol) but when he looks for that tape he finds it’s missing from the archives, his boss tells him that the tape was seized by the FBI in 87 as part of their investigation. As he tries to obtain the tape another way he is told that anyone who asks for it is flagged by the FBI and notices that, across the road from the payphone he’s using, he is being watched by someone in a hoodie that seems to vanish between traffic.

After contacting a Don Cronos fan he’s on good terms with he obtains a betamax (!) copy recorded off the TV that includes the intrusion.

Some late 90’s internet searching later leads him to the former FCC chief who implies there’s more to the tapes than gibberish and latex.

James then ends up getting sloppy at work, loses his job and becomes stalked by the hooded person more which leads to an ever deeper falling down a rabbit hole that culminates in disappearances, murders, kidnaps, basements and an ending that made me sit back for a full 5 minutes to ponder before watching the whole damn thing again.

This movie takes a fairly simple mystery story and then decides to make your brain it’s bitch but if you’re patient, curious and love a mystery this is so worth your time.

You’ve been warned though, it’ll gnaw at you to re-watch

Also if you enjoyed this movie I encourage you, very strongly, to check out Archive 81, available as of time of writing on Netflix.

It’s got a cosmic bent rather than psychological but it deals with very similar situations.