Mind Games (1996, R)

Written and Directed by Kevin Alber

Starring Brian Krause, Maria Ford, Soleil Moon Frye, Richard Paul, Raina Paris

As Reviewed by James Brundage (MovieKritic2000)

When I review a movie that I have seen the beginning of (and turned off) three times, it's normally not a good sign. It tells me that I'm too obsessed with film to not watch a terrible movie to completion. It also says that the movie was terrible beyond belief.

Mind Games, as the tile implies, deals with a horrendous set of implausible mind games that would be nearly impossible to do. Like almost every mystery put out now, it contains more sex than mystery, and thus the movie, which was already thin, has less girth than a bulimic. It follows psychology professor Matt Jarvis, who becomes the victim of a series of incidents stemming from a relationship with a student at his last college (that ultimately resulted in her suicide). At a new college, he is nearly forced into signing a paper stating that he will not date his students (even though its already against the bylaws), becomes the subject of the obsessive desire of one of his students, and ultimately ends up trying to salvage his job due to a series of screw ups.

All the while he is being visited by what he believes is the ghost of his former lover.

All right, first of all, this should tell you that Mind Games is a complete patch work of a film. It steals from Fatal Attraction, from dozens of horror-mysteries, and from about every other erotic thriller ever written. Yet, unlike the erotic thrillers that Mind Games steals from, Mind Games is not very erotic at all. You see, for a movie to be at all erotic, it has to have some tension to it, some pace. Mind Games has neither.

Mind Games, a highly commercial film that failed to recognize that the secret to making a movie sexy isn't just having sex and nudity in it, decides that it should instead pour on the plot. And it does.

Of course, the plot that it pours on isn't original plot at all. Its stolen plot. The plot twists are predictable. The actions of the character make you feel as if you are watching an American style soap opera with French censors in charge. In fact, with a little bit of editing, Mind Games could end up as an episode of "Days of Our Lives" and hardly anyone would notice.

The performances in this movie are atrocious. Each member of the cast acts as if they just graduated with a degree in theatre from a community college. All of the women in the movie have obviously had plastic surgery.

The small grace that Mind Games has is that it does have some bits of conversation that sound authentic. All of the scenes dealing with sex and morality seem completely contrived, yet there is a single sequence of the film between a psychologist and a writer that is pure gold. It is whenever those two characters are together that the writer seems to be able to pull his dialogue off, as if he didn't truly know his other characters.

Mind Games isn't a movie I'm going to particularly discourage you from. I don't really need to. Unless you're awake late at night and watching Showtime or The Movie Channel, you'll never see it. You might find it at your video store, but there wouldn't be much worth in going to search for it. After all, with a movie like Mind Games, why would you want to?