Customer Reviews

Paper Man [VHS]

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This is a futuristic view from 1971 of college students messing with database records and computer networks. I saw this movie years ago before most people had ever heard of hacking. Back before before home computers had been invented, these students had unlimited access to the college's mainframe computer. Monitors were not used back then, so in the movie they interact with the computer through teletypes. See the amazing high-tech sight of every response being loudly and rapidly printed.

Attempts are made to awe viewers with impressive modern technology such as punched cards being read or sorted and also with views of large spinning reels of tape. It was a moderately good mystery movie. When I watched it in the early 1970's, I enjoyed the thought provoking futuristic ideas. I still remember my amazement when they showed the mainframe computers late at night exchanging information with each other without the help of any human. This was a view of the future from 1971. By the way, the movie does not use the word "hacker" which did not mean what it means now anyway.

PAPER MAN is a drama that borders on science fiction. Here, four students assign a credit card to a fake identity by manipulating data banks. Much like "HAL" in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (VHS) (DVD), their cyber-creation battles against its own deletion, to the extent that three of the four end up dead!

This made-for-TV movie long ago warned that tampering with then-burgeoning computer technology could have disastrous consequences. Although this message remains relevant and professional hackers and viruses seem a part of our daily lives, from a distance of almost 40 years the primitive equipment of that bygone era is amusingly quaint.

By the time PM aired in November of 1971, tiny internets were already operational on college campuses. The first, ARPANET linked UCLA and SRI and came into existence in October, '69. Eastern universities offered their own versions of ARPANET. Yale for one had a barebones room with keyboards and monochrome monitors where students could "chat" with like minds elsewhere, play chess with an unseen partner, or contemplate design changes that would one day give rise to the Web as we now know it.


"Paper Man" is available from ALPHA VIDEO on a DVD two-fer, along with AGENCY (1980).

1970s Cyber-Cinematic Recommendations:
WESTWORLD (1973) - A robotic gunslinger's programming goes awry and it murders visitors to a Wild West theme park. (VHS) (DVD)
THE TERMINAL MAN (1974) - The computer chip implanted in a man's brain that's meant to control his violent behavior malfunctions and he becomes a killer. (VHS only)
THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975) - Men of Stepford, CT. replace their human spouses with identical androids. (VHS) (DVD)
STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979) - The computer brain of a Voyager space probe launched from Earth hundreds of years earlier will stop at nothing to transmit all it's learned to "the creator." (VHS) (DVD)


Parenthetical number preceding title is a 1 to 10 viewer poll rating found at a film resource website.

(6.4) Paper Man (TV-1971) - Dean Stockwell/Stefanie Powers/James Stacy/Tina Chen/Elliott Street/James Olson

Computing the way it was and the way they saw it would be in the future. Add to this a mystery that may rival Stephen King fans.

Avery Jensen (Dean Stockwell) is discussing how all the computers in town are linked together. Some rambunctious students see this as and advantage to getting a credit card. So they get fellow student, Karen McMillan (Stefanie Powers) and a young cutie to vamp Avery into making a man on paper. Everything is going swimmingly until the paper man purchase a gun and grows an unnecessary birth certificate. Now it looks as though the computer has a mind of its own and the creators are meeting with a mysterious demise. It also seems mysterious that Avery seems immune.

It is interesting to see the actors as they were in this movie the Lisa (Tina Chen) that teaches the computer to say breath (death) is in the movie "Three Days of the Condor".

Three Days of the Condor [Blu-ray]