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Black River

2001, Movie, PG, 88 mins

Black River: Review

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This made-for-TV science-fiction thriller doesn't overextend its premise or vitiate tension with repetitive scare tactics. Unfulfilled in Tinseltown, novelist/screenwriter Bo Aikens (Jay Mohr) considers settling down in an industrial park community called Black River. Bo hopes that he might be able to overcome his writer's block in this idyllic spot, and Black River's mayor, Tom Thompkins (Stephen Tobolowsky), encourages him to make the move. After tangling with a belligerent trucker, Bo tries to leave Black River, but false highway patrol reports and tow-truck snafus conspire to leave him stranded — train service is temporarily suspended, and Bo's credit card company denies him car rental privileges, claiming that his card is maxed out. The unseen force that restrains Bo also sees fit to punish the bullying trucker with electrocution by jukebox. Meanwhile, the mayor is encouraging another Black River newcomer, fledgling architect Laura (Lisa Edelstein), to make Black River her home. She's come to reunite with her long-lost sister, waitress Mandy (Ann Cusack), but Mayor Thompkins lets on that if Laura were to stay, the plum assignment of designing a cultural center would be hers. Laura is quickly smitten with Bo, but she dismisses his paranoid fears about driver-less cars and sinister messages from pay phones. When Bo meets the terrified inventor of the SCV — satellite-controlled vehicle — he realizes that a malevolent artificial intelligence is pulling all the townspeople's strings. The same force that murders the SCV inventor persists in enforcing Bo's residency. When Bo tries to exit the town on foot, a force field stops him in his tracks. Is there any way Bo can circumvent the invisible power and exit this happy, happy village? Seasoned with just the right amount of black humor, this anti-technology thriller manages not to distance viewers with its outrageous premise. Instead, it draws us into a Silicon Valley-type Twilight Zone in which men are mastered by their own inventions. A keeper. leave a comment --Robert Pardi
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