Pics Bio News Movie Reviews Box Office Poll Guestbook Home

The Cell This is from September 2000's Maxim and I thought it was kinda interesting... "...Hey lady, you wanna give back the cheese slicer now?..." The Cell Jennifer Lopez takes a journey inside the twisted mind of a comatose serial killer. Funny, we can't seem to get her out of our heads, either. What do you get when you cross The Silence of the Lambs with A Nightmare on Elm Street? A psychological thriller chock-full of the most surreal imagery this side of a Dennis Hopper flashback. What do you get when you toss in the mind-bending Jennifer Lopez? Something we'll all line up to see! Lopez plays Catherine Deane, a sexy psychologist who is experimenting with a radical drug therapy that enables her to enter a patient's psyche and literally experience what is happening in his unconscious mind. That's OK when she's poking around in some ailing kid's Romper Room of a sub-conscious, but when we switch gears to an FBI takedown of ingenious serial killer Carl Stargher, played with Hannibal Lecter-caliber menace by Vincent D'Onofrio (who you probably last saw as Men in Black's evil space roach), we just know that the mental manure is about to get deep. Sure enough, Stargher winds up in a coma. So zealous G-man Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) convinces Catherine to take a little trip into the monster's slumbering synapses to discover the location of his last victim, hidden helpless and with only hours to live. Instead of the dandelions and frolicking puppies you'd expect to find in a sexual sadist's cranium, Catherine encounters terrifying apparitions that threaten her sanity (sort of like an Alice in Dungeonland). These eye-popping sequences, jammed with lavish sets, bizarre visuals, and disorienting camera techniques, come courtesy of Tarsem, a one-name director tackling his first feature after making his mark with surreal music videos. As Catherine confronts each of the predator's five alter egos, she becomes seduced by his dark would and in danger of losing her grip on reality. By the time she enters the lair of the Stargher King, a man-beast with a peirced spine, she had morphed into a slinky vamp with a preference for S&M. (Too bad the killer doesn't have a fantasy about a topless beach...) With all the outlandish distractions, it's a credit to Lopez's talent that she keeps us focused on her journey through this freaky mindscape. Now if we could just go inside her head and figure out this whole Puff Daddy thing.