This movie sounds promising but just plain doesn't deliver.A potentially interesting plot is completely ruined by: Terrible acting.Poorly mixed sound. I had to crank my receiver way up to hear what these poor excuses for actors and actresses were blathering on about.Beyond low budget filming and effects, what effects?A kid with a camcorder could have done better.This would have made for an excellent episode of MST3K.Hopefully I can save someone from wasting an hour and a half of their lives by steering them clear of this failure.

...and in present-day America, someone makes an awful film about it.The setting (explained (or rather, not) by a sentence or two about Luddites) is quite literally like Soviet Russia conquered the USA. There is nothing to look at; a pile of junk is more visually attractive than this film.But what about the acting? Let's put it this way: Stephen Galaida seems to have stayed in character throughout the film. Only, he stayed in the Puzzlehead character when he should have been Walter. Robbie Shapiro was slightly better, but still in the category of bad. In fact, their acting was so bad it was like watching porn, only without the sex. And with better music.As for the comments describing the film as intellectual, thought-provoking SF: if this is the very first piece of SF you've been exposed to, then yeah. Otherwise, the ideas explored in this film have been explored in countless other works, and much better so.Consider yourself warned: this film is not an overlooked little gem, it is a waste of time. Consume quality SF instead.

I had the good fortune to see this movie at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and listen to the director and the lead actress in it answer questions. He spent 6 years editing and putting this movie together and it shows despite the obvious budget limitations he faced.Anyways, the film itself is basically about a man who creates a robot (named Puzzlehead) that looks exactly like him and whose "synaptic map" is a direct copy of his own. The two look the same except for a beard. The man has a crush on a local grocery store clerk and Puzzlehead the robot is the one who ends up finally meeting her. She thinks he's a human etc. and the drama begins. The plot goes from there and i don't want to spoil it but basically there's a lot of twists involving who is the real man and who is the robot and which is ultimately the better person.The film handles robot artificial intelligence issues really well and shows the progression of how a robot would likely think and the striking differences and similarities between humans and robots. The film makes the audience truly question who is more human. All the technological mumbo jumbo is easy to understand so you don't get into a situation where you're confused (like that movie "Primer"). But the plot does stay a little ahead of the viewer.The film obviously could have benefited from a bigger budget, but there are an enough circuits and gizmos and filming techniques that convince us that the protagonist created a robot.There is subtle humor throughout and the plot is constantly engaging. I strongly recommend everyone see this film.On a side note: the lead actresses's dialogue was all replaced by some other woman's voice to make it sound more eastern European. I was surprised she was at the screening, I would have been mad.

"Puzzlehead" is much like an extended "Twilight Zone" episode warning about man creating artificial life in his own flawed image.It draws on myths from the doppelganger to the golem to Pygmalion and their psychological counterpart in "Fight Club," to sci fi from Asimov's Robot Rules to "Star Trek"'s "Data" character to darkly answering Philip Dick's question "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (the basis for "Blade Runner"). But this film makes battles about the Rise of the Machines more intensely personal than in "The Matrix" trilogy and even more intimate than in the new "Battlestar Galactica" series.Several elements raise it up beyond other robot genre films - the look, sound and, to a lesser extent, the role of woman and procreation in this nihilistic future.While filmed all in Brooklyn, the film looks like it is set in a violent, post-apocalyptic vaguely Eastern European dictatorship, both through the settings and the gritty and changing point-of-view cinematography and editing.The sound design very effectively adds to the creepy mood. According to Q & A with the director and crew at the Tribeca Film Festival, problems with the original ambient sound necessitated a re-recording of the entire soundtrack, including the actors' voices. Capitalizing on the look, the actors' original voices were replaced by other voice-overs with added accents so that all the speaking has the slightly disconnected feel of dubbed over foreign films, adding to the uneasy theme of relations between man and machine.The superior music selections, mostly heard Dogme style played in situ, add to the tense atmosphere, from the Yiddish folk song "Dona Dona" (its chorus here is eerily ironic, usually translated as "But whoever treasures freedom/Like the swallow has learned to fly."), to Bach and Scarlatti played on a harpsichord as if it's an automatic player piano.A unique element to the Frankenstein aspects of the story is the viewer's shifting sympathies between the creator and robot, usually based on how each relates to the woman, even as toward the end we scarily lose track of which one is the human.Writer/director James Bai, in the Q & A, cited Daniel Keyes' ironic story/novel "Flowers for Algernon" (the basis for the movie "Charly") as an influence, but I was struck more by the warning of human creators transmitting their intrinsically violent and emotional flaws.This film deals with some of the same issues as "Artificial Intelligence," but is to that film as the recent version of "Time Machine" is to "Primer." It is being showcased by the Alfred Sloan Foundation as the latter film was, for creatively showing science in society."Puzzlehead" can definitely be marketed to adult fans of robot movies, sci fi and "The Twilight Zone," but I doubt it will appeal more widely.