Customer Reviews

The Lawnmower Man

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

The first time I saw "The Lawnmower Man" I felt something was missing from the story. I had this same feeling about "The Abyss." When they first release "The Abyss" on DVD it included two version of the movie on one DVD. The second DVD contains other materials about the making of the movie. The movie went from 145min to 170min. With though additional 25 minutes the movie had structure added to it. The science fiction part of the story stood out. The same thing could be said about the "The Lawnmower Man" if they would release the Director's Cut of this movie on DVD.

The theater version of "The Lawnmower Man" on VHS was 107min in length and the story seem to be missing something. Then the Director's Cut came out on VHS and it was 141min in length. The added and rearranged scene made this story presented more structure to it. The concepts of what led Job to do what he did at the end of this feature are explained.

Uniformity, it does not seem that no one has no intention to release the Unrated Director's Cut on DVD and VHS copies ware thin after so many plays. I do see that you can still get the Unrated Director's Cut version on VHS through "Amazon.com" for $10.00 without shipping & handling cost. If you have never seen this version of the film I would advise you to get it on VHS. The whole story is presented here and it made change some people's opinion about the movie.

I am aware that some of the outtakes are presented on side B of the DVD. If you do not know where they fit in the story it can be very confusing and appear to be unimportant. Also, a lot of the scenes were rearrange to fit the theater version and this miss up the original story.

I just purchased this dvd yesterday at the store without reading some of the reviews on Amazon first. I was excited when I saw the "deleted scenes" section on the back of the dvd case because I was lead to believe that these were the scenes deleted from the director's cut version and place on the back side of the disc. I was very disappointed that the deleted scenes were from the original movie (original release). These scenes are essential to the entire telling of the movie. My recommendation: DO NO PURCHASE THIS MOVIE ON DVD! - at least not until a new version with the "deleted scenes" replaced back into the original format, but I won't hold my breath for it to happen. TOO BAD THERE ISN'T A "NO STAR" RATING - THE DVD VERSION DESERVES IT!

To describe it in a few words the Lawnmower Man is an excellent movie with a great cast and intriguing plot. I first saw the movie on VHS and loved it. When I saw the DVD and looked on the back of the box to find it had twelve deleted scenes I was very excited. I immediatly purchased the DVD even though I already owned the movie on VHS. When I saw the deleted scenes however I was furious. They were just parts of the movie that had been taken out and called deleted scenes. Then I realized on the box of my original VHS movie it read "the Director's Cut". I can't believe that those scenes were completely removed when they seemed so critical to the plot; especially the part with Roscoe and the death of Caroline. The commentary on the disc is also misleading. I thought that I would hear a critic of the movie by maybe some famous critic like on the Dark City DVD(which had Roger Ebert). However the comentary talked nothing of any real elements of film such as imagry or allusion, it just seemed like a behind the scenes with the writers. Like I said the movie is fantastic but don't waste the money on the DVD until they come out with a directors cut. If you can't wait buy the directors cut on VHS.

With the release of "Lawnmower Man" on DVD, important scenes have been removed and retired as useless extras on the opposite side of the disk. These scenes play an integral part of the original story line, and in comparison to the VHS release, the DVD version is drastically butchered. Why bother; put them back in the movie where they belong to preseve the movie's original essence. You should not have to put a movie back together like a puzzle!

I've always considered films based on Steven King novels & short stories to be a hit-and-miss affair. They're either pretty good, or really bad. In the case of `The Lawnmower Man', however, I found it to be just okay... not bad, but nothing spectacular. I watch it more for it's virtual reality scenes than it's story. Although seeing Jobe (Jeff Fahey) develop from a simple nitwit to an incredibly intelligent, and dangerous, entity with deadly psychokinetic abilities was interesting to watch. And his attempts to enter and control the virtual world make for some of the most memorable CGI special effects moments since `Tron' and `Terminator 2'. And with all of the VR scenes, I can see where the Wachowski brothers got one of their many grains of inspiration for `The Matrix'.

My only complaint is that the DVD version isn't the Director's cut, which is available on VHS. It does include the deleted scenes as a special feature, but they're not restored in the movie itself. Bummer!

`Late

When this movie was first released on VHS I immediately noticed an inconsistancy. When you looked at the length of the movie on the video case it had the same length as is listed on amazon at 108 mins. However if you actually sat down and watched the VHS release, it was actually about 2 1/2 hours long. Then I bought myself a VHS copy of the film and again I found that it was a version far longer than indicated on the video case. When I bought this movie on DVD it again said that the movie was 108 minutes long, I assumed it was the same as the VHS had been with the same inconsistancy. I was very wrong. When I watched the DVD, it was not an extended or a director's cut of the film. It was the original 108 minute theatrical release of the film. I was so disappointed to see so much footage cut away from the film which I had seen on the VHS release, that I returned the DVD right away to where I had purchased it from. I am keeping my VHS copy of this film, and I am waiting for the extended director's cut to be released on DVD or Blu Ray before I buy it in that format. If anyone knows anything about this, let me know.

Lest anyone miss the point other writers weren't making clearly: This is NOT the movie you saw at the theater! New Line Platinum Series has taken the movie apart and reconstructed it as a chopped version on Side A, and if you want to see the twelve sections sliced out you have to flip the disc over!! They've vandalized this movie! Something's rotten here! Really! It's criminal! Damnit!

This is one one of my favorite computer movies of all time, under WarGames and Tron. When the movie first came out on video I ran out and bought it. Man was I upset. They had cut most of the scenes I had seen in the theater. So they came out with a Directors Cut VHS... Beautiful. Figuring DVD is the wave I expected the cut scenes to be in the movie. No... as an add on. How hard would it have been to just put them in the movie. Protest against this DVD and buy the Directors cut VHS.. and convert to cd your self.

My delight in and fascination with this movie revolves around the elements related to accelerated learning - yap, I have a certain obsession with mind-stuff and learning, development of different abilities, so this movie was right up my alley.

The movie involves a scientists who has passion for mental development. His main tools are nootropics (smart drugs) and virtual reality. His experiments are funded by government which is only interested in creating killers. The original experiment is conducted on a monkey. It goes astray when the monkey breaks lose and kills few people. Though, even this neurologically rewired monkey doesn't kill indiscriminately - he assesses whether the individual he is facing is potentially dangerous or not. For that matter, one could say, this would work even on the instinctive level of an animal. This monkey, on the run, stumbles upon a Lawnmower Man - a good-hearted, simple, young man whose mental development has been arrested somewhere around the age of a 5-year old and who just happens to live next door to the scientist's house.

Lawnmower man and the monkey strike instant friendship, however the government agents track down the monkey and shoot him. Lawnmower is devastated (he has identified the monkey as one of his comic strip characters come to life), and so is the scientist. But then, the brilliant idea occurs to the scientist, to continue his experiments in private on the Lawnmower man.

He begins infusing him with nootropics and stimulating his mind with virtual reality. The first images impressed upon his mind, very much in the way subliminal programming is used are the seals from the Solomonic magick. Different parts of his brain are also neurologically stimulated, following by feeding the man's mind with more information.

This is a sci-fi movie, but the learning process does have some parallels to the methods and techniques used in real life. There are lots of people who are taking nootropics (smart drugs), albeit in oral form; and subliminal and supraliminal programming - if not yet quite the use of virtual reality - are alive and well. Those who are familiar with photoreading and different techniques from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, also know that the mind does tend to absorb information better when it is delivered fast, as well as when all of one's senses are engaged in the process (that's the stimulation that virtual reality here provides).

So, the hero of this movie, Lawnmower man, makes extraordinarily rapid progress - together with amassing huge amount of knowledge in record time, absorbing the information mainly subliminally, he also begins to develop different abilities which are normally considered supernatural. This, as matter of fact, also makes sense, because development of such abilities is based on stimulating and creating new neural connections. The more he learns, the more hungry for learning he becomes. There's also the reality that anyone with passion for learning is well aware of. His ultimate desire is to "be all" - yet another element, that those who are involved in spiritual growth are very much into - the ultimate goal of merging with All There Is. This, being a sci-fi movie, instead of merging with the spirit - our hero merges with the virtual reality - which is a decent metaphor for the spiritual reality / a quantum reality, where everything is made out of mind stuff and through the mind one becomes omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.

In vast majority of the movies, it is this ending where the movie flops and this ultimate level of omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience either for dramatic purposes or due to lack of understanding of those who play with the idea, ends up in feeding individual's ego (that was even worst in Highlander than in this movie), as the one who has become All just won't have any desire to go and kill others - how could he - he IS present in all (even all others) - but for drama needed to make movies exciting this element that one would be all loving at this point, seems as if it would be boring. In any event, here is where The Lawnmower Man II, flopped - it went into cyber neverland and lost the spirit of the original theme.

The Lawnmower Man has always been one of my favorite movies since the first time i saw it in the theater. I saw it so often i got to the point where i memorized many of my favorite scenes

Only one porblem... when i watched the DVD, parts were missing.
i flipped to the deleted scenes menu and wouldn't you know it, there they were, but you couldn't watch the whole REAL Movie with them in. The deleted scenes were nothing more than scenes deleted from the actual movie to give the illusion of adding something to the DVD version.

not only shouldn't you buy this movie, you should write many many angry letters to the makers of the DVD