When I was coming home from watching The Cell, I saw an overweight homeless woman hike up her skirt, drop her baggy undies, and take a whiz right there on the sidewalk in front of me. A police cruiser happened to be stopped at a red light immediately in front of her, and the officer in the car saw the whole thing happen clear as day. However, when the light turned green, he just drove away into the dark Burbank night without so much as flashing his lights.

I think this is a metaphor for the movie. Just because you can do something and nobody stops you doesn't mean that you should, whether it's peeing on the street or trying desperately to contrive a plot around the idea of making CG visual panoramas of the inside of a serial killer's mind.

I went into The Cell knowing absolutely nothing about it except that it starred that chick that I always confuse with Salma Hayek. Coming out, I don't have that much more to add.

In the movie, science has invented a technology whereby using quasi-musculatured virtual reality suits, trained counselors can enter the minds of comatose patients and try to talk them out of it. Great. Why can't they invent a suit that goes inside the minds of Hollywood producers and talks them out of making movies that are going to suck. The potential return on the investment is incredible. The trailers provide three excellent cases in point.

1. The Watcher - Look, don't give me any lip about The Matrix or Much Ado About Nothing, I don't care who you are, where you grew up, or how many times you've been hit in the head with a pipe wrench, when you see Keanu Reeves, all you can think is "And I'm Ted 'Theodore' Logan! And together we are WYLD STALLYNS!" Don't make him a "creepy" stalker type. And if you must, for God's sake, don't let him talk in the trailer. All I could hear was "Dude! I'm TOTALLY going to KILL you!" The movie is called The Watcher. They should have just made him watch things.

2. Urban Legend II - Remember strung-out, Cassandra-complex Linda Hamilton from the asylum in Terminator II? Knowing that there was a huge cataclysm on the horizon, but powerless to stop it? That's me watching the preview for Urban Legend II. Did nobody else realize that the first one totally blew? And as if that wasn't bad enough, did nobody else already see this "kids get killed while making a slasher movie" film the first time it came out when it was called Scream III? Screw virtual reality suits, I need a cyborg badass from the future to come and help me lay waste to this movie before it has a chance to become self-aware.

3. Almost Famous - I find this trailer to be physically exhausting. By the time it's over I just want to curl up and take a nap. Is there anyone, and I mean anyone out there who doesn't know already how every single minute of that movie is going to play out? It's a Joseph Campbell textbook set to rock music. Hooray. Watching the preview is like being at Christmas dinner and having to just sit and listen to Grandpa tell you the same forty-five minute story about how a Ford used to cost a nickel, word for word, that he just told at Thanksgiving dinner. This movie is going to be the same way, except there's no chance of your mom saving you by asking you to help with the dishes.

After we kick the crap out of the brains of the people responsible for those movies, we'll come back for the makers of The Cell.

The movie begins with Jennifer Lopez exploring the mind of a comatose millionaire's son in an attempt to revive him. The visuals are very striking. Miles and miles of desert, dunes and sky, and Jennifer walking through it decked out in a gown of billowy white feathers. Perhaps it is symbolic of the boy's isolation, and Jennifer represents a bird that will help him fly away from it all.

Whatever.

Let's be realistic. The mind of a pubescent boy is not a beautifully manicured Successories print. It's a messy bedroom with a mattress overstuffed with porno mags lifted from his dad's mind's sock drawer. If you let a Vaseline lipped Jennifer Lopez loose in this kid's head, he's not gonna wake up, he's just gonna tear an embarrassing hole in his VR suit.

But of course it doesn't matter. The kid isn't important to the movie at all. He's only crudely wedged into the film to establish this crazy brain-walkin' technology. If this were a George Lucas movie his entire role would have been replaced with scrolling yellow text. The poster says "This summer... enter the mind of a killer," not "This summer... feign interest in a rich brat in a coma."

Enter the killer. Keanu could take some lessons from this guy in the creep department. From the first time you see him and his... er... attachments, your skin feels like there's a million gooey beetles running over it. Eeeeesh that guy is creepy! He makes that "Are you comfortable?" thing from Liquid Television look like an episode of The Shirt Tales.

It seems that this mad killer likes to kidnap sexy young girls and then put them into a deviously automated forty-eight hour death machine that he apparently picked up at a Legion of Doom yard sale. Whaa? When the Riddler ties Batman to a rocket sled that's set to wait ten minutes and then launch into pile of birds with chainsaws for heads, you don't question it. He's a supervillain. They just have these kinds of things. However when some guy has his very own custom overly-elaborate Rube Goldberg death contraption, you do question it. At least I do.

And when this freak takes a big brain nap, there's only one person who can go inside his melon head and find out where the his clockwork life-extinguisher is before it runs its course one last time, and she just happens to be a sexy young girl.

Please, somebody make the hurting stop.

If you want to make a disturbing movie about what the inside of a serial killer's head might look like, just do it. Just start it there. Have you ever seen a Brothers Quay animation? They don't contrive a half hour of plot to explain why the world is populated with dusty monocular babydolls with skull fractures, they just do it, for cryin' out loud.

I guess that's what it all comes down to in the end. If you desperately want to see some live-action, computer enhanced nightmare fuel, then go and see a big heapin' helpin' of The Cell. For an optimal viewing experience, this reviewer recommends showing up a half hour late and bringing your Discman and your Nine Inch Nails Further Down the Spiral CD.

That's almost as disturbing as the smell of fresh hobo pee.

Did anyone else laugh out loud at the cloth with the picture of the circuit board that could do a live motion CAT scan of a person's brain instantly? It was so silly. It was like somebody in props said "Well, it looks high tech. It's got a picture of one of them circuit whatchamajiggies on it. It would probably do the same stuff. Let's run with it." I couldn't help but think of Lex in Jurassic Park locking the doors of the complex using the Irix "buttonfly" demo.

And what about Vince Vaughn's character? Remember when he and Jennifer are sitting by the fountain and he declares knowingly that even a kid with an f'ed up childhood can grow up to be normal? I assume this was supposed to lead us to believe that he himself had a screwed up childhood but turned out normal, right?

Since they had already established the fact that two doctors could enter the patient's brain simultaneously, I assumed that at some point he was going to have to go in to save Jenny, and would be confronted by his own personal demons inside the brain. I was only half right. Unfortunately, it wasn't the interesting half.

But to make up for not exploring that avenue that they had set up, they opt to just make him want to brain bang Jennifer Lopez instead. The whole movie he's all "THERE'S NO TIME! WE'VE GOTTA SAVE THAT GIRL! GO FASTER, DAMN YOU! IT'S OUR ONLY HOPE!" Then the second that Jenny starts sticking her tongue down his throat, all the sudden he's off the clock.

"It's not real! None of this is real! It's all just in your head! It's... mmmm... say, that's nice... Wait! It's not real! It's not... mmmm... mmmm... oh yeah... there's nothing wrong with letting the girls know that you're money and that you want to party."

And then later, before going into the VR for the final showdown, what the hell is she supposed to be doing with those images she reviews? It's like she's taking a refresher course in things she likes so she won't forget. "Okay, I dig white birds and the Virgin Mary. Got it. Let's kick some cerebral ass! Break!"

I'm not a big shot Hollywood writer. I don't get paid the big bucks to write stuff like Bring it On or Coyote Ugly, but I have a suggestion for what could have made this movie cool.

What if Jenny had succeeded in killing the representation of the "evil" Carl Stargher, but had managed to let the child remain? What if Carl then awoke from his coma, having had the psychotic part of his brain neutralized by Jenny's radical therapy, as a completely sane, rational person? There could have been all kinds of exploration of his own coming to terms with his previous self, and society's likely rejection of his "rehabilitation."

Wouldn't that be a discussion starter? You could have left the movie with something to talk about other than the way that your stomach turned when he hung himself from the rings in his back.