Blame It on the Brain

Suggestion to Sony: Since never-say-die metal gawd Rob Halford recently penned a riotous tune called "Cyber World," and since he'll be gigging in NYC soon anyway, why not finagle a live accompaniment from him for IMAX's new animation spectacular CyberWorld 3-D? Touring on lyrics like "At speed of lies I will connect/I search and surf as I infect/Computerized catastrophe," Halford and company would fit right dandy into the slapdash jumbo-screen phreak-out, in which a ray-traced Jenna Elfman battles narsty flesh 'n' exoskeleton bugs who munch on strangely alphanumeric source code. And that's just the glue binding a bunch of randomly accessed cartoon memories—a bit from Antz, a truncated Simpsons segment (Homer's z-axis excursion, natch), various latter-day Beyond the Mind's Eye wannabes—together into the Epcot ride from e-Hell. Like Rob sez: "Your information's what I steal/I scan you till you are unreal."

Now, don't get me wrong. While Halford, if they could get 'im, would certainly up CyberWorld's humor quotient (Simpsons aside), nothing's lacking in the execution. See, the technology's way beyond head-movie par—everything from PC-smashing gorillas (don't ask) to deep-sea plunges roaring at ya in full-on eight-story 3-D overkill. An under-60-minute runtime nearly negates the faulty construction, and hell, what's not to love in the sequence depicting a musty circus stationed aboard a zeppelin being pulled by airborne whales? All in all, it kinda follows Rob's lead, "spreading there inside your brain/a Trojan Horse that eats your mind," a techno-happy bumrush screaming the joy of never thinking twice about repeating things ad nauseam, and as loud as possible.

Wonderwall, by comparison, is naught but nappytime. You'd think that by 1969 "psychedelic" exploitation flix would've surpassed absolute tedium, but Joe Massot's nutty-professor-as-voyeur schmutz resembles nothing so much as the test reels cinematography students shoot to play with lighting and filter effects. Sole decent line: "It looks as though your pet vermin are not well"—the rest of the trip being terminal. Inspired an Oasis song . . .