“His mind is like a clean, hungry sponge.”

The Lawnmower Man is ostensibly based on a Stephen King story but nothing like it at all. The original tale is about a Pan-worshipping landscaper who crawls behind his autopilot mower, naked, eating the grass clippings, then ritually sacrifices his clients when they begin to catch on. It ends with a severed penis in a birdbath. King disowned Brett Leonard’s film version, which stars a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan as a hubristic scientist who uses psychoactive drugs and virtual reality to enhance the capabilities of an intellectually disabled gardener (Jeff Fahey) in a wild cyberpunk mash-up of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon (1966), Altered States (1980), and Frankenstein (1931) that utterly misunderstands every allegorical model it invokes. The former dullard has spent half his life mowing and the other half getting whipped by a nasty priest (Jeremy Slate) who has seemingly never read the Book of Job (another source the film haphazardly invokes). Now a megalomaniac with a messiah complex capable of psychokinesis and telepathy, he “evolves” into a godlike being of pure energy within the interconnected digital realm and subsequently wreaks havoc on all and sundry. Questioning how our bodies and minds might be changed by technological augmentation, the film posits a worldview in which all kinds of energy—mental, sexual, spiritual, electrical, musical—though intangible, can be transmuted and concentrated toward evil ends by an all-powerful entity. It’s intriguing and fun with a touch of boldness (it takes chutzpah to commit to POV shots of both a lawnmower and a chimpanzee—talk about artistic license), and its once state-of-the-art visuals (handled by the studio that would later become Rockstar San Diego and produce games like Red Dead Redemption [2010] and L.A. Noire [2011]) are now equal parts charming and trashy, but ultimately The Lawnmower Man is a thoroughly low-brow, genre-fluid rehash of the idea that pursuing knowledge without wisdom is a dangerous game. I’m not without some affection for it.