Hollow Man

Day 292 - 10/19/09 - Movie #292

BEFORE: Demons? Check. Vampires? Check. Werewolves, Frankenstein's Monster, mummies? Check, check, check. What's left for Shocktober? How about an updated version of "The Invisible Man"?

THE PLOT: Scientists discover how to make people invisible, but their test subject becomes an insane killer who stalks them.

AFTER: Yeah, special effects have come a long way since the first "Invisible Man" movie, with Claude Rains wrapped up in bandages, and wires moving teacups and cigarettes around the room to show where he was...I remember being stuck for a Halloween costume once in high-school, so I wrapped my head and hands in Ace Bandages, put on some sunglasses and a suit, and I went as the (very-visible) "Invisible Man"...

Now we've got green screens and CGI, making for some amazingly graphic transformation scenes as Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) turns invisible in stages. We see his skin disappear, then his muscles, organs, and finally his skeleton - hey, it's a free anatomy lesson with purchase of this movie! And in the updated version, he wears a form-fitting latex mask instead of those silly bandages.

There's a lot of techno-babble about things like "bio-matrix energy" as the experiment takes him out of "quantum phase shift" - so he's still there, but he's out of phase with our universe on a quantum level? (Honestly, this probably makes about as much scientific sense as hitting a corpse with a bolt of lightning to bring it back to life...) But of course, Something Goes Horribly Wrong, they can't make him visible again, and he starts to get frustrated and irritable, which might be a side-effect of the radiation or the serum or the quantum phase shift - look, it's not important, just roll with it, OK?

So he does what any red-blooded American invisible man would do - sneak out of the lab to spy on beautiful women as they shower...but that's not enough, once he gets a taste of power. We're never sure if it's the invisibility that makes him crazy, or the freedom that comes from being invisible, or if it's from lack of sleep (it's hard to sleep with transparent eyelids, after all...) He seals off the lab and plays a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the lab techs, which include his ex-girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue), her new boyfriend (Josh Brolin), the millionaire and his wife...sorry, I mean Greg Grunberg (future star of "Heroes") and character actor Joey Slotnick.

This turned into a very tense thriller with a lot of those creepy "Is he sneaking up on me?" moments. It sort of begs to be remade as a late-night Cinemax flick, just by adding more of the spying-on-women parts and taking away the killing spree parts.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Twinkies

SPOOK-O-METER: 4 out of 10 (graphic violence and gross internal organ viewings)