While working on a revolutionary surveillance computer, Ed (Gary Day)
has a car accident that leaves him paralized - which gives his business
partners a good opportunity to put him under surveillance in a new
appartment, as for some reason, they want him off the project. For some
other reason though, they move Ed in with the surveillance computer he
himself has developed, and he of course keeps on working on the thing.
Eventually, business partner Whitehead (Brian McDermott) and another
silent partner decide it's time to get rid of Ed, but they entrust Ed's
former mentor Hollister (Peter Collingwood) with the task who not only
fucks up the kill but manages to get killed himself instead ... With the
help of his computer, Ed has meanwhile found out that the upstairs
neighbour Stollier (John Ewart) has killed his wife (Jill Forster), and
now wants to investigate ... but since he's paralyzed, he needs help, and
neither his wife (Penny Downie) nor his nurse (Kim Deacon) are all that
keen on helping him. What Ed doesn't know though is that Stollier is
exactly the silent business partner who wants him killed, and since
Hollister has bungled up things, he himself moves in for the kill with a
poisonous syringe ... when he's shot dead by Whitehead, who has obviously
changed sides and now wants to hook up with Ed - but then his brain is
fried by Ed's computer which has long taken on a life of its own and has
now decided it needs no humans no more to achieve his goals. Basically,
this is a retelling of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, but all of
the old movie's charme is substituted by one of these new-fangled computer
thingies (even though neither the scriptwriters nor the director seem to
understand much about the subject matter). Plus, there is also an evil big
business subplot that seems to come right out of an episode of Dallas
regarding its subtlety. Sure, this combination is still able to give the
audience some giggles (in all the wrong places), but as the serious sci
fi-thriller it was intended to be, Crosstalk quite simply put
misses pretty much all the marks: It's badly written, sloppily directed,
lacks tension and suspense, and worst of all, it's dead boring.
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