HOLLOW MAN

HOLLOW MAN
Original VCD

Movie: * *
Disc: *

Starring: Kevin Bacon, Elisabeth Shue
Language: English
Subtitles: None (No subtitles)

What would you do if you could turn into the Invisible Man? Why harass, stalk and eventually kill off your fellow co-workers of course! Wouldn't anyone? Or at least, this is what Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man would have you believe.

After Verhoeven's 1997 Starship Troopers (one of the most subversive and best sci-fi movies in years) it was only obvious that Verhoeven's next effort, Hollow Man (2000) would be a disappointment. Not that it is all that bad, if taken as an example of the slasher genre. It has some good special effects and towards the end things go totally overboard with truly implausible Verhoeven ultraviolence and the characters doing some really really dumb things.

It's a watchable entry even though you'd be shouting insults like "you moron!" to the onscreen characters.

THE DISC: Censorship is a peculiar thing. I remember watching Robocop (ironically also a Verhoeven film) on apartheid run TV years ago and gasped in amazement as they tried to sanitise one of the most violent and foul-mouthed movies of the 1980s into something the whole family can watch. Censors rarely seem to get it: by shortening some over-the-top violent scenes they actually made the violence in those scenes more realistic and worse. Take the memorable scene in which a hapless board member gets it at the, erm, hands of a malfunctioning robot. As the robot blasts away, it is gruesome at first but as it keeps on firing (out of all proportion to the perceived threat as a malfunctioning machine would) it becomes funny.

Also, with this broadcast version, the censors didn't simply leave out any swear words - they'd have been left with a soundtrack consisting of white noise! Instead they creatively found words sounding similar to the verboten f-word. The end result was rather endearing in its own twisted way.

Why am I mentioning this? Because the f-words have been removed from this VCD version of Hollow Man produced for the Malaysian market. This is very ironic because as far as I can make out none of the violent scenes has been excised, and it is a rather violent movie. Like Kurtz (the Marlon Brando character in Apocalypse Now) said: "We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

That his movies have been targeted by two regimes not particularly noted for their human rights records would probably make Verhoeven proud.

This is sad however since this VCD of Hollow Man isn't too bad really. While the sound is a bit flat (especially when compared to the excellent Resident Evil VCD), the picture quality is quite acceptable.

There aren't a lot of f-words in Hollow Man, but their absence still irked me (I never really took kindly to censorship). The moral of the story: beware when buying VCD disks from the Far East, where film censorship is a reality. It isn't the supplier's fault that the movie has been censored, but to be honest they could have warned one on their web site. (To be fair, they usually do warn one of any potential problems when purchasing certain VCDs.)

WORTH IT? If you're a fan of the movie and don't mind a few missing f-words.