Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 23, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Memory, which opens in New York and LA two years after its production, was originally monikered MEM-(O)-RÉ. That’s derived from the opening screen containing a dictionary-style pronunciation and definition of the title—and you have to wonder about a film that finds it necessary to define such a generic word, or that thinks it’s dramatic to do so.
Based on a novel by Bennett Davlin that went unpublished in the States until the movie came into existence, Memory was also directed, co-scripted and co-produced by Davlin, and bears all the earmarks of a vanity project whose creator had no one around him willing or able to tell him when he was doing wrong. Sloppily structured and poorly developed, it’s barely a horror film, but rather a banal and tepid mystery-thriller with paranormal underpinnings; excise its smattering of f-bombs and scenes of children in peril, and it could easily play on the Lifetime channel.
The movie stars Billy Zane, who’s done fine work in villainous roles in the likes of Demon Knight and Dead Calm, but can’t even fall asleep at his desk convincingly as our protagonist, Dr. Taylor Briggs. A Boston-based researcher into Alzheimer’s and similar diseases, he’s on a lecture trip in Brazil when he’s called to the bedside of a hospital patient who has been brought out of the Amazon jungle with severe lesions on the portions of the brain that control the memory. While taking a shower in his hotel that night, Taylor is hit with the first of a series of hallucinations that make him witness to the kidnappings and killings of young girls by a masked, black-garbed figure—which, he discovers, began a year before he was born. It’s not long before Taylor learns that that patient, and now himself, got dosed by a Native South American voodoo powder that causes the dosees to tap into the memories of their ancestors.
At this point, it couldn’t be more obvious where the story is headed, and it becomes equally clear that Davlin is at a loss about what to do in between Taylor’s visions, and before the tale reaches its foregone conclusion. So he marks time with pointless scenes involving Taylor’s longtime friends Carol (Ann-Margret) and Dr. Max Lichtenstein (Dennis Hopper), which have nothing to do with anything but providing excuses to cast screen veterans whose names will look good on the movie posters and DVD cases. There’s also a completely unconvincing romance between Taylor and artist Stephanie (Battlestar Galactica’s Tricia Helfer), whose second date begins with Taylor suggesting they go ice skating and ends with the couple hanging around an abandoned building in the rain, suggesting that Davlin himself experienced a bit of memory loss between writing the beginning and end of the sequence.
Indeed, the whole movie proceeds just this clunkily and haphazardly. When Taylor travels to a lake he’s seen in a vision, decides to explore its bottom and throws on a full scuba-diving suit he just happens to have in his trunk, it’s supposed to be completely plausible because we’ve earlier been given a close-up of his to-do list with “Pick up scuba gear” at the top. But when he subsequently loses his keys in the dark and fires off several flash photographs with a huge camera to find them, the viewer can’t help waiting for the moment when one of those pictures will reveal a vital clue—except it never comes, rendering that moment pointless. Later, Taylor breaks into the home of a current abductee in search of evidence, and the villain not only knows when he’s there, but when he turns on the vanished girl’s computer, the better to send him a threatening instant message. Even the Canada-doubling-for-the-U.S. locations don’t convince; I’ve been to Boston, and you, Vancouver, are no Boston.
Memory has long since fallen apart by the time it remembers it’s supposed to be a thriller, and Taylor just happens, in a building he’s supposedly visited many times before, to stumble upon the killer’s huge, secret, fetishistic dungeon. As the end credits roll to the accompaniment of one of the soundtrack’s incongruous guitar ballads, you may find yourself wishing you could erase this film from your memory.
