Word: paybacks
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...Originally ran Monday, February 25, 1991). After being stunned in overtime in Providence, R.I., two weeks ago, the Brown's women's basketball team was looking for a little payback Saturday night at the Briggs Cage. But Harvard had two things in mind...
Interfilm's "Mr. Payback," written and directed by Bob Gale (creator of "Back to the Future"), presents this coercion in a new light. The 20-minute movie, which you're invited to experience twice, is like a filmed Choose Your Own Adventure, except that audience members engage in a putative competition to determine the plot twists...
...Payback (Billy Warlock) is "a hero for the common man--part man, part machine--programmed to seek outrageous justice for his clients against those who have done them wrong." An opening sequence introduces viewers to our hero and his attractive hacker sidekick Gwen (Holly Fields). Mr. Payback states his motto, "Don't piss me off!" and his mission, to rectify the evils of society. Then viewers choose from three plot lines, each one more politically correct than the last. In one, a woman has been sexually harrassed; in another, a black man has been fired form his job and cheated...
...each case, predictably enough, it's payback time. Mr. Payback gets on the job, and with the help of the computer-literate Gwen and her pet geese--whose raison d'etre in the film is totally inexplicable --exacts revenge upon the villain responsible for his client's humiliation. The final scene always involves the wronged individual confronting the wrongdoer (as in life itself, the wrongdoer is always a white male) and meting out to him his just desserts, the exact nature of which are determined by audience participation...
This is not to say that interactive movies can't be fun. "Mr. Payback" is mildly and mindlessly entertaining. The plots are all the same and all cheesily trite, but because of the nature of the enterprise, that's not really the point...