Granger, a former Special Forces soldier living in modern-day Vancouver, is sent on a quest to fulfill an ancient prophecy. He is forcibly pulled into a time portal in his home after fighting off a small group of hooded assassins who try to kill him. He finds himself several hundred years in the past, in the forested war-torn Kingdom of Ehb. Granger teams up with an unlikely band of allies, accompanied by a female doctor named Manhattan. His goal is to slay the leader of the "Dark Ones", a witch known only as the Holy Mother. Fighting against all odds, Granger must free the land from the grasp of the evil tyrant Raven, save the kingdom, and find a way to get back to his own time.
The Lawnmower Man is a 1992 science fiction horror film directed by Brett Leonard, written by Leonard and Gimel Everett, and starring Jeff Fahey as Jobe Smith, an intellectually disabled gardener, and Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Lawrence "Larry" Angelo, a scientist who decides to experiment on him in an effort to give him greater intelligence by stimulating his brain using nootropic drugs and virtual reality computer simulations. The experiments give Jobe superhuman abilities, but also increase his aggression, turning him into a man obsessed with evolving into a digital being.
Dr. Lawrence Angelo, a scientist at Virtual Space Industries (VSI), runs experiments using psychoactive drugs and virtual reality to enhance cognitive performance, labeled "Project 5". Angelo has benevolent aims, but VSI is funded by "The Shop", a clandestine group hoping to find military applications for Angelo's research. One of his test subjects, a chimpanzee named "Rosco," is gifted with new intelligence, warfare training, and increased aggression; he escapes and is killed by the laboratory's security forces. Angelo consequently decides to recruit intellectually disabled gardener Jobe Smith as a test subject, telling the man he will become smarter. Angelo redesigns the intelligence-boosting treatments to remove the "aggression factors" used in the chimpanzee experiments. Not only is Jobe's intelligence enhanced, but he also develops psychokinesis and telepathy. He continues training at the lab until an accident forces Angelo to abort the experiment.
The project director, Sebastian Timms, keeps tabs on the progress of the experiment and secretly swaps Angelo's new medications with the old Project 5 supply. When Jobe invites his new lover Marnie to the lab to engage in cybersex, he accidentally lobotomizes her. Jobe continues the treatment on his own and begins killing the people who mistreated him in the past, as well as the abusive father of his 10-year-old friend Peter. Angelo learns the drugs have been swapped and confronts Jobe, who captures him and declares his plan to reach an ultimate stage of evolution by becoming a being of "pure energy" existing in the VSI computer mainframe, connecting to all computer systems of the world afterward. He promises his "birth" will be signaled by every telephone on the planet ringing simultaneously.
The Shop sends a team to capture Jobe, but with his new abilities he scatters them to pieces. Jobe uses the lab equipment to enter the VSI mainframe and become a digital being, abandoning his physical body. Angelo remotely accesses the VSI computer, encrypting connections to the outside world, and traps Jobe in the mainframe. As Jobe searches for an unencrypted network connection, Angelo sets bombs to destroy the building. Feeling responsible for what happened to Jobe, Angelo enters virtual reality to attempt to reason with him one last time or die with him. Jobe overpowers Angelo and crucifies his digital body. Peter runs into the building and Jobe realizes he is in danger from the bombs. Still caring for the boy, he allows Angelo to leave the mainframe in order to rescue Peter. Jobe escapes through a maintenance line just before the building is destroyed.
The plot of Stephen King's 1975 short story "The Lawnmower Man" concerns Harold Parkette, who hires "Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services Inc." to cut his lawn. Parkette later spies on the serviceman, discovering his lawnmower mows the lawn by itself while he crawls after it, naked, eating the grass. The serviceman is actually a satyr who worships the Greek god Pan. When Parkette tries to call the police, the mower and its owner ritually kill him as a sacrifice to Pan.
Meanwhile, director Brett Leonard and producer Gimel Everett wrote an original screenplay about virtual reality technology titled Cyber God.[6] They were inspired by seeing Jaron Lanier and his VPL Research technology at a San Francisco event called "Cyberthon"; Brosnan later suggested using some Lanier's lines in the film, and both VPL's DataSuit and EyePhone appear in the film as props.[9] Allied Vision decided to combine the two projects, and between May and August 1990 they rewrote their script into The Lawnmower Man. The new screenplay carried minor elements of King's original story, including the scene where Jobe kills Peter's father with the lawnmower "Big Red", and the aftermath in which the police state that they found some of his remains in the birdbath. The addition of a government agency known as "The Shop" was drawn from separate works of King's, such as Firestarter (1980) and The Tommyknockers (1987).
The film has several elements in common with the 1959 Daniel Keyes novel Flowers for Algernon, which also deals with a mentally disabled man whose intelligence is technologically boosted to genius levels. A similar parallel can be drawn with the Star Trek television series (second pilot) episode of 1966 titled "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
Principal photography on the film began on May 28, 1991, in Los Angeles with a $10 million budget.[6] The computer-generated imagery (CGI) was created for the film by Angel Studios.[10] The scene where the priest is set on fire is an early use of motion capture, and was done by an Italian company who used the technology as a tool for golf training. A technique called the Gemini process was used to transfer CGI onto film by putting the digital images on a high-resolution cathode-ray tube [CRT] screen, frame by frame, which were then shot with a motion picture camera.[11] The supervising sound editor was Frank Serafine, who was hired as a result of his sound creation work in the 1982 film Tron. Fuji Creative's Masao Takiyama is also credited as a co-producer.
The original theatrical release had a large element cut from it involving Rosco the chimpanzee. In the film's opening Rosco escapes the lab and is helped by Jobe, who then witnesses him getting shot dead. This then led to several other cuts throughout the film to remove call back to this plot element. Another major difference includes moments with Lawrence's wife. In the theatrical cut she just disappears, but in the director's cut, Jobe controls her later on, and still later she is killed by the agents. Along with those major additions, there are also several scenes with extra dialogue.[12] The director's cut was initially released on VHS and laserdisc by New Line Cinema. The 1997 DVD however only included the theatrical cut with most of the director's cut scenes included as deleted scenes. In 2017, Shout! Factory released both cuts on blu-ray, both taken from 4K scans of the original elements.[13]
As of July 2024[update], the film held a 37% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 43 reviews with an average of 4.9 out of 10. The site's consensus states: "The Lawnmower Man suffers from a predictable, melodramatic script, and its once-groundbreaking visual effects look dated today".[14] Metacritic gives the film a rating of 42 out of 100 based on 14 reviews.[15]
The movie debuted at number two at the box office with $7.7 million in its opening weekend behind Wayne's World.[16][17][2] It went on to gross $32.1 million in the United States and Canada,[2] making it the highest-grossing independent film for the calendar year[18] and the second biggest released in 1992 after Miramax's The Crying Game.[19] It did better internationnaly and grossed 3,622,720 ($6 million) in the United Kingdom and $112 million in other markets for a worldwide total of $150 million.[20][5]
The film, originally titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, differed so much from the source material that King sued the filmmakers in May 1992 to remove his name from the title.[4] King stated in court documents that the film "bore no meaningful resemblance" to his story.[21]
A federal judge ruled in King's favor in July 1992, the first successful such ruling since James Oliver Curwood had his name removed from 1922's I Am the Law.[4] On appeal, it was ruled in October that the on-screen credit could remain but that King's name should be removed from advertising.[4] King received $2.5 million in settlement.[4]
The theatrical version of the film was initially released on VHS and Laserdisc on August 26, 1992. Alongside the 108-minute theatrical version, New Line Home Video also released an unrated director's cut running 142 minutes on VHS and Laserdisc.[24] The success of the unrated version alerted King to New Line's continued defiance of the order that his name be stricken from the film's credits and all marketing as the back covers stated "Based on a Story by Stephen King". A third court order was needed to force the studio's compliance. As before, the court upheld the two prior judgments, but it took the extra step of imposing a penalty of $10,000 directly payable to King for every day New Line remained in contempt by defying the order. Additionally, the studio would have to forfeit all profits earned on the film during that same period.
In February 1997, the director's cut was released in widescreen for the first time on double LaserDisc, featuring various special features on the C-side. The transfer used for the LaserDisc left King's name in the opening credits, but removed it from the title screen.
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