THE EBOOK COVER
I am not guesssing when I say the writer, director, and production company had no idea what to do with the book's theme of sex-change, even in 1995. You will see this when you watch the trailer for the movie, below. They describe the plot in such glittering generalities that the never once give even a smidgen of a hint of the plot.
The film makers took out all the sex and replaced it with violence. That is symbolism so rich it hardly needs detailing.
The website Mondo Esoterica was astonishingly perceptive when they reviewed the movie:
"Co-written by director Allan A.
Goldstein, Memory Run
credits the novel Season of the
Witch by Jean Marie Stine as its inspiration (set in the
future, the book sees a rapist sentenced to have his consciousness transferred
into the brain-dead body of his victim and then struggling to come to terms with
his new body and identity via series of sexual encounters, the book was written
as the writer underwent the process of gender re-assignment and is a very
personal exploration of the changes involved). The film solely borrows the
gender-switching storyline of the novel, although like everything else in the
script, the idea is terribly underdeveloped. Gone is the darkly ironic idea of
the gender switch being a punishment for a misogynist, instead it seems to be a
rather gratuitous experiment and not enormously relevant to the storyline as a
whole - there are no real gender issues discussed and Celeste could easily have
had a woman's consciousness transposed without needing to change the script.
"In fact Goldstein's storyline as a whole
never seems quite sure what direction to take and feels far too simplified. Set
in an utterly generic dystopic future, we never find out how the 'Life
Corporation' has taken-over, or why, there are no attempts to show what life is
like for normal people or over what scale of the world the corporation has
control, we are just left to assume that corporation is evil. Similarly the
rebel groups seem to have no specific motivation or demands and we just have to
assume they are good. Even the opening makes no sense as we see Fuller robbing
his girlfriend's house, whom he pretends to kill, only to return later to sleep
with, only for one of his group to frame him for her murder (as opposed to
killing him for certain and framing her?). Obviously wanting to appeal to the
straight to video action crowd, the film packs in an excess of gratuitous
action scenes during the second half (most of which appear in the trailer)
which somewhat dispels the dark atmosphere built up and the latter half of the
film takes on a pretty typical action movie plot with the characters trying to
break into Life headquarters, when given the storyline, a descent into
surreality might have been far more appropriate."
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