Cell, The

THE CELL Quality: * * Acceptability: -4

RATING: R

STARRING: Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn and Vincent D'Onofrio

DIRECTOR: Tarsem Singh

DISTRIBUTOR: New Line Cinema

GENRE: Horror/Thriller

INTENDED AUDIENCE: Adults

SUMMARY: The Cell stars Jennifer Lopez as a psychologist who goes inside the virtual mind of a comatose serial killer. An FBI agent enlists the psychologist's help so he can find where the killer has stashed his current victim, who may be alive. The psychologist begins to lose herself in the killers mind, confusing fantasy with reality.

When not focusing on the killers perverted eccentricities, the film's visuals can be quite beautiful. But to experience this beauty, viewers must subject themselves to an array of disturbing, often bloody, sadomasochistic images, such as an actual disembowelment, a corpse sitting in a tub filled with blood, and women being drowned in a locked cell. Accompanying this sick milieu is a scene where a symbolic Virgin Mary figure stabs someone and commits euthanasia on another person. Despite its allusions to battles between good and evil, The Cell manages to make sadomasochism look attractive.

CONTENT Hindu pagan worldview with images evoking the Virgin Mary, plus perversion of Christian baptism ceremony, but woman victim recites Lord's Prayer; 26 obscenities and 10 profanities; extremely violent images, including scenes of women drowning in glass cell filling with water, man disemboweled during torture, guillotine contraption slices horse into sections but with little blood, images of bleached and naked female corpses, bloody stabbings, woman uses sword against villain as if killing a vampire, child abuse, and woman drowns little boy in dream world; sadomasochism strongly depicted, implied necrophilia and male sexual function briefly mentioned; upper male and female nudity and rear nudity; no alcohol use; smoking, heroine uses marijuana, and use of drugs in a clinical setting; and kidnapping.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Sep 1, 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved