That reptile part of my brain made me run like hell from the certain death that a cloud of fentanyl would deliver. Choked screams rang out in the chill of the night as the cloud devoured the gang of miscreants that was the Goose Lord gang. I finally stopped, panting for breath and looking behind me to see how far the cloud was behind me. I saw no fentanyl cloud, but the cloud in my mind was beginning to lift. In all the confusion, I had left Edwige behind.

I noticed drop water hitting my hand: rain.

— To be continued. 

Tonight’s movie is 2000’s The Cell from director Tarsem Singh.

This is a strange one, folks.

From a screenplay by Mark Protosevich, this production had been in the works for years before being picked up by New Line Cinema in 1998. Roger Ebert listed the movie as one of the best movies of 2000 though other critics didn’t care for this film. But their names escape me, so who cares? It’s J. Lo literally entering the mind of a sadistic serial killer.

Do I have your attention?

Our movie begins with a child psychologist Dr. Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) riding a black stallion in the middle of a desert, but none of this is real. It’s all in the mind of a young named Edward who is currently in a coma. Dr. Deanne believes this new treatment of jumping into the consciousness of comatose patients will help pull them out of their condition. Too bad the FBI would rather have her jump into the mind of a comatose serial killer!

Our killer’s name is Carl Rudolph Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) whose main pastime is kidnapping young women and leaving them in an empty tank that will eventually fill up with water drowning them. Later, he bleaches their corpses white and you don’t really want to know the rest. Needless to say, special agent of the FBI Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) wants to catch this psychopath and find out where his next victim is being held before it’s too late. Unfortunately, Stargher has some kind of aneurysm and slips into a deep coma. If only there was someone who could dive into his brain and find out where his latest victim is.

Granted, Dr. Deanne has no experience with violent psychopaths, but she’s only entering the killer’s mind. She can leave whenever she wants. All she has to do is press a chip embedded in her left hand and she’ll be pulled from this nightmare. But in Stargher’s own mind, he is the absolute ruler. Dr. Deanne enters a room with a pretty pony only for that pony to get sliced up into parts and stuck in glass displays. Stargher eventually notices she’s rummaging around in his mind. When Dr. Deanne finally meets him, Stargher goes to meet her, a long silken cape that was previously the wall follows. And then he looks down at her and screams, “Where do you come from?”

Dr. Deanne can’t press that chip on her hand fast enough.

Even after she comes back to the real world, she is somehow coaxed into going back into his mind. Special Agent Peter Novak even follows her back. If you ever wanted to see Vince Vaughn getting tortured by a foppish Vincent D’Onofrio, then this is the movie for you.

I found The Cell quite freaky.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643, episode 644, episode 645, episode 670, episode 686, episode 687,  688, and 689) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.