Hey, Have You Heard About This New Internet Thing? The Makers of this movie kind of have...

Actors appearing in this movie have also starred in such films as:

...and a whole lot of daytime television

Surely this will be a watchable 90 minutes of my life, you say.

Oh dear readers. See what happens when you call me Shirley? 

Quick Plot: We start with an affair gone mysteriously wrong when a man’s lovemaking to a faceless blond is interrupted by his wife and, off camera, a gunshot. Cut to 10 months later when now faced blond Sandra (Terri Colombino, a sort of first draft version of Kristen Bell) is moving into a new apartment headed by a cheerfully nosy landlady named Christine.

Cheerfully nosy landladies are great for exposition, see, because they allow our protagonist to explain all the makings of the Internet or, as Sandra and several other characters like to say, their very own Cyber World*. Through Sandra’s own FaceSpace page (yes...FaceSpace), we meet an online chat room community who gather weekly to play some never quite laid out trivia game in order to win movie memorabilia. Among the members are:

• Sandra, who goes by the oh-so-annoying moniker SassyPlanner 

• William Forsythe as an inexplicable chick magnet literary professor

Sexxxxxxxy

• Body Snatchers (and ice skating girlfriend of Brandon Walsh in Season 1 of 90210) as a scarred ex-model (I think) with lawyer troubles (primarily because her lawyer is played by a possibly sedated Billy Dee Williams)

• a bitter young lesbian mourning the death of her lover by spilling her guts out to a very weary Charles Durning as a tea-drinking therapist

•  Mark (played by the original Angel in Broadway’s Rent) a flamboyant special effects artist with a cat that bares a chilling resemblance to my own

• and a single mom sex phone operator

Also, a pair of mismatched FBI agents (including a barely audible Tony Todd) are investigating something or other which eventually leads them to suspect perky Sandra of masterminding a complex murder ring of sorts. This gets extra complicated (wait...the entire movie is already harder to understand than calculus) when Sandra falls for her generally rude neighbor Joe, whose sister conveniently enough is the busty agent heading the investigation. 

Perhaps the not-quite-explained connecting threads of all the characters is some sort of statement on the 6 Degrees of Separation quality that pervades cyberspace. Or perhaps the writers simply decided plotting would be easier if everybody had something in common, whether such a choice made any sense or not. Either way, iMurders contains far too many characters, far too many storylines, and far too few moments of any tension. A twist ending is mildly amusing enough (even if I did call it), but that doesn’t really add much merit when the film had taken us out of the main mystery with an extended subplot regarding Forsythe’s infidelity and career woes.

Oh! And did I mention the 3 minute scene wherein a janitor kind of hits on a young blond, who kind of rebukes him to discuss knowledge, which he kind of seems into? 

Trust me, I just made more sense than the entire film itself.

High Points

The ambitions of the mystery, which include about three major red herrings, are admirable enough...

Low Points

...though it’s a shame that a) they don’t all add up and b) none are actually interesting

Lessons Learned

The FBI has a very loose dress code that encourages cleavage display. This is especially convenient when you’re about 2 feet taller than your well-endowed partner

It’s hard to put the milk back in the carton when you’ve already had the cereal. And that makes some sort of statement on having an affair, I think

When attending an esteemed dinner of academics, the best possible accessory you can carry with your tux is a manilla envelope that contains blackmailing material

One should avoid smiling so cheerfully when giving a news report about a single mother found brutally murdered

The Winning Line

Cinemax Lesbian #1: “I love you.” 

Cinemax Lesbian #2: “I know”

Does quoting The Empire Strikes Back make iMurders awful, amazing, or smart enough to round up a second form of linkage on imdb?

Rent/Bury/Buy

Thankfully, iMurders is on Netflix’s Instant Watch which allows for a guilt-free viewing by only the truly self-hating film fans out there. This is not a good movie. To some extent, it has a so-weirdly-awful-that-you-might-be-tempted-to-try-it kind of vibe, but I discourage most of you out there to waste too much time attempting to untie the knots of logic put forth by the writing in this movie. In the end, you’ll probably have more fun logging onto your own FaceSpace page to play Boggle or snarkily enjoy the fact that your old enemy from high school is now fat. Weigh your priorities with care.

*As you might guess, I spend a fair amount of time online and am happily engaged in supportive and rewarding Internet communities. Of the many other users I know, I’ve never heard a single one refer to such a place as Cyber World. Am I missing out on hip new lingo, or is this one more example of how writers Robbie Bryan and Ken Del Vecchio have never actually logged on?