Who says that all made-for-television movies have to be bad? Oh, sure, Douglas Williams' Overdrawn at the Memory Bank isn't the best movie out there. An adaptation of a 1976 short story by John Varley, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is surprisingly intelligent for its meager budget and production values. It tells the story of Aram Fingal (played by the late, great Raúl Juliá) a bored programmer working for a giant corporation called Novicorp in a dystopian future. Through a series of mishaps, his consciousness is inadvertently trapped inside the HX368, Novicorp’s central computer. So, with the help of a computer controller named Apollonia, he decides to try and take down Novicorp from inside its own computer. During this take-down, he creates his own virtual version of the outside world and mixes it with locations and characters from his favorite movie, Casablanca (1942). Sure, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank has problems. One of the most glaring was that it was shot on video instead of film stock, it used an over-abundance of chroma key and blue screen effects, and a few of the performances are very hokey. But I like to imagine that if this same story was given a better director and a larger production budget, it could have become a minor classic. I've always loved movies that twist our conceptions of reality and Overdrawn at the Memory Bank does a charming job. Could it have used another few coats of polish? Sure. But considering their resources, the makers of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank did a decent job.
6/10
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