As uninvolving as its title, this direct-to-video quickie lingers in the memory about as long as the average entry-level resume.
Darren Danver (Ian Ziering), young San Francisco computer programmer, moves to Nevada with wife Deb (Katherine Kelly Lang) to take a dream job with cutting-edge software publisher CTC Corporation. Boss Tom Moore (Andrew Stevens) shows the couple their luxury condo and outlines a brilliant career
future. CTC, it turns out, is secretly embedding subliminal commands in their multimedia products; a CD game called Amazing Mouse Maze, distributed free, mesmerizes customers into buying companion programs at any cost. The company also peddles a line of cyber-porn under another label, and the
mind-controlling images in "Eroticom" software can turn a person into a love slave--or a suicide. The previous holder of Danver's position tried to expose the scheme and was murdered, but not before hiding an incriminating Eroticom disk in the condo. After learning about his murder, the Danvers
become suspicious. To keep Darren quiet, Tom and wicked executrix Meg (Kim Morgan Greene) have the new arrival brainwashed and videotaped in an intimate interface with co-worker Angie (Rainer Grant). But the blackmail threat fails when Deb hypnotizes an Eroticom test subject into recalling her own
degradation as an executive-suite sex toy, and realizes that Darrin's will had not been his own. While Tom flees in the corporate aircraft, Meg is held at gunpoint by the rebellious Angie, and Darren races the clock to prevent zombified Deb from carrying out implanted instructions to kill herself
at Hoover Dam.
The hack level of intellect involved in THE CORPORATION is typified by Darrin leaping in his car and speeding to save his wife, when a simple phone call to Hoover Dam security would have sufficed. The narrative manages to fit in four explicit sex scenes (three if you prefer not to include the
molestation/rape) in the opening half-hour alone, and judging from the shapely actresses duly undraped for the camera, the Nevada locale could well be named Silicone Valley. Compared to other contemporary B-movies with high-tech settings, THE CORPORATION does (almost refreshingly) little to
exploit its computer-age milieu for special-effects glitz, and instead unreels like a conventional Evil Businessman thriller rather than science fiction, although its sinister window into the software industry bears out the paranoid fantasies of a generation of jaded gamers addicted to popular
"giveaway" programs like Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom. That still doesn't make THE CORPORATION worth a play. As he's done before, actor-filmmaker Andrew Stevens reserves a small role (fully clad) for his actress-mother, Stella. (Violence, extensive nudity, adult situations, sexual situations,
substance abuse, profanity.) leave a comment
