Fun fact: In The Lawnmower Man (1992), the eight minutes of computer generated effects in the movie, took seven people eight months to complete on a budget of $500,000.
Well, that explains how the movie still manages to look cutting edge. When the guy morphed into the hobgoblin and ejected semen from his mouth onto his vegetable girlfriend, that just wouldn't have been possible for what I had assumed was in the neighbor of $500k. It's like how those in the biz like to say: "The money is all on the screen, now get in the back of my van and drink this delicious tonic!"
@@khhnator even Pyramid Head from the first Silent Hill or Lara Croft's pyramid shaped breasts still hold up better than the CG effects in Lawnmower Man, both of which were created years after said movie.
@@theactualTVB back then, I believe video games, and rendering for movies were Technologically different. I remember seeing a documentary on RU-vid about (might have been Tron?) one of the first ever movies to heavily incorporate CGI with live action....... And they were literally handwriting code for each scene, and having this huge elaborate process because there weren't the types of tools we have today. Nothing like Valves engine to render "movies" using like team fortress characters, etc. No proper Game/CGI engines, with libraries, SDK's, or anything at all they could pull from. No software to work with. So they were literally handwriting the code as they went, instead of having the software do it. Ill see if I can find The video and share the link, but if you're interested, u could try YT search for something like Tron CGI process.... Or Early CGI movie process, and something cool might come up, even if iTs not the exact documentary I'm talking about.
@@TheDefaultgameer I know you was joking, and I was just gonna agree, but them I remembered a video (and I'm paraphrasing here) Cody was mainly the voice/narrator (because Tyler was to shy or something to do it himself. I forget), but that he initially wanted to cover geography, but got bored/felt trapped and wanted to expand........ Then came the age of (what I call) his LSD phase, with the crazy animation styles, that progressively got more trippy but also more improved, and then I guess he wanted to change interests again, and then he entered (what I call his "more chill than the most spiritual hippy phase) and the editing style calmed more from the crazy visuals, as he went into his more broader range of topics covering things like VR history, how companies aren't your friends, and more philosophical viewing of the topics. Tyler's done a lot of growth and change thru his main channel and whimsu.
I worked on the PHYSICAL special effects for this film. It had those too! There’s a director’s cut with more physical effects scenes. Yes, we were perplexed during production that Stephen King’s name was on the script, anywhere. Then, the story unraveled further.
Did you have anything to do with the remote control of the mower? Thinking of building a remote controlled Big Red replica, looks like it is based on a 20 inch McLane front throw reel mower and any info would be helpful, especially the source/make of all the added parts.
took the first vid down because it was demonetized for a copyright claim tried a bunch of stuff, still kept getting claimed re-uploaded with a higher quality upload instead, still demonetized but ya know that's "fair use" for ya
Lawnmower man: "By the turn of the millenium a technology known as VIRTUAL REALITY will be in widespread use." Us now: "Lol Grandma did a header into the TV and got wrekt!"
I remember seeing this movie in the theaters with my friend Mike, and when the agents were dying Mike exclaimed, "oh no! I am being color separated to death!" I think I laughed for about about six minutes. I remember being just utterly befuddled by this whole thing, because not a damn bit of the movie made the slightest sense, and it was as that was written by someone who just had no clue what virtual reality was, but it seemed like a Kronenberg film or some thing, and he had like a video toaster left over from Star Trek six and then this was the bastard offspring. Just a hysterically incoherent awful movie, and I remember my other friend afterwords kept talking about how deep it was and how I just didn't get it because I was not deep like him. He was super deep. He called everyone "Hermes," for some reason. Make of that what you will. Deep. I didn't even I was very surprised when there was a sequel to this. How the hell is this successful enough to warrant a sequel? Please do not review the sequel. I have never seen it and I fear what the frightening implications of it might do to my brain so I would prefer not to know. Thank you.
I watched this with a few friends last year, it was honestly bizarrely entertaining in how much of a bad early 90's time capsule of a movie it is. I was in awe at some of its most inane and ridiculous moments on my first watch, as I had no idea what the movie was going to be like at all.
@@masstv9052 most of us were born in the mid to late 90's so there was not really any nostalgia at all. The best part was the first time I watched it, I was actually watching it in Vrchat with a VR headset on at the time, which made it even more of an experience. I found it so funny I convinced another group of friends to watch it a few days later.
@@legodude0 oh, that's so cool. Were you all able to watch it in VRchat also? Or was it just a regular get together on the TV? Using a VR headset for lawnmower man is so meta. Lol
@@masstv9052 There's movie rooms on the game so we were watching it in one of those. Yeah we kept bringing up how weird and surreal it was to watch a movie about VR in VR.
Interesting factoid: New Line Cinema straight up ignored the court ruling to take Stephen King's name off of the marketing. In '94 they released the VHS with King's name on it and was pretty quickly slammed and held in contempt of court.
The movie capitalized on people's general misunderstanding and ignorance of VR and the internet at the time. Today, the idea of portraying VR as opening a gateway to a parallel dimension is just laughable beyond words.
It's supposed to be that reality itself by nature is very much a virtual world, not that it opens portals to parallel dimensions. It is in essense and unintentionally a prequel to the matrix and the 13th floor movies.
Its a highly strange allegory for the sublimation of virtual space into our own reality that we are currently experiencing on an increasingly literal level as all of our attention is absorbed by digital media and most of our real lives only serve toward that entertainment space. Very little of this film could ever be taken literally but the metaphoric angle is scarily prescient in that typical paranoid schizophrenic way
I had to watch the original upload of this video, read the Wikipedia article for Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man, and watch this upload to realize the “connection” between this movie and the Stephen King short story is that a lawnmower operates itself
I've kind of come around to this one. The early 90s cgi has a certain aesthetic to it that hits the nostalgia buttons, even if it isn't very good by today's standards
Brings back such nostalgia. I was 11 and my dad sneaked me into the cinema to see this as it was a 15. He was terminal and wanted to watch this last movie with me since we were both gamers
Man a friend on discord showed me this a few months ago, I was wondering when this fever dream of a movie would wiggle its way into the mainstream of the internet.
great video. i remember watching that movie with my mom when i was young. it was so weird i never forgot about it. this is truly the serial experiments lain of live action movies
The film was good and original for it's time. This review is really trashing the movie, the reviewer must be a Zoomer. It's hard to explain why this was a good movie if you weren't there at the time.
Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett were obsessed with VR, to the point where Leonard explicitly chose the sigils that flash in front of Jobe's eyes, when he gets his first dose of VR-activated nootropics. The nineties were this weird niche where people like Leonard pushed for high-concept sci-fi on shoestring budgets and with this weird, blind faith that their scripts' basic assertions would turn out to be real. The same works with Leonard's next feature release, Virtuosity. As for any sort of consumer-level electronics effectively making people smarter... That's complete bull, obviously. The only tenuously real thing in there is nootropic drugs as a concept, seeing as a lot of us are familiar with focus-enhancing drinks. If you've ever drank a Red Bull, a Guru or even an old-ass can of Jolt Cola, you just took in what was designed as a nootropic, with the only proven nootropic molecule on the current market being caffeine. Your average Red Bull can has concentrated amino acids and taurine in it, plus weird, New Agey stuff like ginseng extract, but we have no proof that stuffing a soda with guanine or even synthesized taurine has any real benefit. Taurine's used to rebuild muscle and maintain cardiovascular tone, but it's freely available in meat and fish - and the concentration of the stuff in a Red Bull can wouldn't make much of a difference for healthy individuals. So, VR's not going to make your brain swell up, and smart drugs are still at the drawing-board phase, nevermind what Red Bull's PR team has to say. We're a long shot from Bret Leonard's weird, Oculus Rift-powered Age of Aquarius nonsense.
i wouldn’t say smart drugs are still in the drawing board phase, but all the viable options except for caffeine are controlled substances. (i’m not 100% sure if i agree with them being so heavily restricted tbh). prescription stimulants and modafinil are considered nootropics, and iirc they have some cognitive benefits such as improving memory and problem solving. as someone who has to take a lot of these medications i can’t tell if they’ve made me any smarter, but at least now i can force myself to complete basic tasks and i don’t suddenly fall asleep on the floor in the middle of the day anymore lol
Robots might not have taken over the world in a manner as awesome as The Terminator might have, but walk into a GM factory, observe the self-automated forklifts, welding robots and painting robots and you'll see that perhaps they won out in a much more banal manner.
1:43 "So the monkey does some good shooting in Quake 2 and we get this amazing shot before the opening credits roll." I know I'm stoned rn, but that line hit especially hard for some reason. 🤣
I watched the director's cut recently and I'll be damned if this isn't incredibly entertaining. It's kind of crazy how dated it feels even to films made from the same time period, but that's what gives it is charm. Really fun film.
As I recall it's a short story about a gardener who worships the Greek god Pan and makes sacrifices to him, including mowing down either a cat or a squirrel. It's definitely a much more (excuse the pun) earthier story.
I guess there's a lot of people who have never heard of this movie. Being a kid at the time when it came out... it made more sense at the time for some reason.
I thought you were joking when you said there villain wanted to ring all the phones in the world, in a comedic quip. But as his actual intention? That's the sort of motive you'd expect from a Terry Pratchett character
I got to play VR right after this movie was released. Played it in like 1993/94 maybe. The game was weak, but it was cool to see. I thought it would have been way bigger, and it died out. I'm surprised it took so long to come back around. But I guess the tech had to become way cheaper for computers to really start powering the potential of vr.
Isn't King's Lawnmower man a 12 page story about a weird Satyr like creature doing yard work? How do you get "Flowers for Algernon" but, written by William Gibson from that?
Really love this move it, watched it for the first time a few weeks ago and it’s Pretty impressive for the time. I mean people are just now getting hip to VR headset, gloves, suit. It was pretty forward thinking. I really love the ethics of it all. Also also the bringing sentence about VR being widespread hasn’t happened YET, you gotta say yet because we still have much so see. Also robots haven’t taken over YET, gotta say yet these days lol love your channel
reimagining this movie as a slasher with a serial killer who controls lawnmowers with his mind, the shot of the lawnmower bursting through the window was just hilarious
Dammit, thank you for making this. I was obsessed with this movie as a kid when it came out for some reason, and this is such a hilarious and perfect retelling of it. Also, the title alone is worth it: "a movie that exists"
Commenting this before even watching this video; I saw this film actually a couple years ago with a group of friends. Days before, one of my friends were looking through an old game store with me and I picked up a game with a strange name and a goofy looking cover. An N64 game I believe. I picked it up and showed him and laughed at it saying, "The fuck is this?" He weirdly didn't seem surprised. "It's lawnmower man. I saw a review of it before. It's based on a movie." Fast-forward back to the day we were watching the movie. It was moist in the room, warm, and generally dark and uncomfortable (Florida lol). And not a single person out of the 4-5 people in that room fully understand what we watched that night. If you ask all 5 of us the plot, and all that we remember, you'll get VERY different answers. To this day I think about the day I'll sit down and watch the movie again while zonked off my gourd. I'll probably watch it with my girlfriend and see where that goes and what happens.
"Hey in order to build this internet thing we should just use the already existing phone cables since they would offer plenty bandwidth, what would possibly go wrong?"
The only thing this movie has of Stephen King's ideas is the lawnmower seemingly moving by itself (as in his short story called the Lawnmower Man), and his blatant hatred for White Christians (that's basically showing up in all his books and stories).
Somehow so convoluted I was actally wondering what and why and also what does it have to do with anything from first movie? I remember very well..watched it in cinema too lol
I’ll absolutely give the movie this: that 3D graphics imagery of a lawnmower-mouthed face mowing over a brain is one of the most perfect interpretations of the kind of nightmare I would’ve had as a kid.
I never saw this movie, but remember doing a double take when I saw the CGI scenes in this clip; there were these movies I watched as a kid called The Mind's Eye series that were just random assortments of primitive CGI reels, and I was unaware until now that the origin of a bunch of the CG clips from the second were actually from The Lawnmower Man.
So, fun fact about my first time watching this movie. I first encountered this movie when playing VR chat and going to a VR movie theater. I was randomly scrolling through the sci-fi movies and I saw this film really confused as to why it was in the sci-fi section. Absolutely baffled at the fact that this movie would be about virtual reality. This movie (despite some of the outdated stuff) holds a little place in my heart lol.
The movie is basically the guy finds out the nature of reality is much like the virtual worlds and he somehow glitched into a well of knowledge and abilities. Same way people glitch or break video games by overloading something. Essentially his brain was overloaded by the virtual game thing and he got glitched into forbidden wells of reality.
