David Cronenberg reverts to the science-fiction genre after a lengthy time away from it, although one hesitates to employ the standard opposition to genre fiction -- "straight" fiction -- to categorize such extravaganzas (or perhaps that should be eXtravaganZas) as Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, and Crash. In his own original screenplay, he has posited a near future in which virtual-reality games appear to have replaced television, movies, the Internet, everything, as the preferred form of amusement. Game designers are the Spielbergian deities of popular culture, and their obedient flocks have had themselves surgically fitted with "bioports" -- plug-in sockets at the base of the spine -- to enable them to connect their game-pods directly to the nervous system. (The vibrating pods look like fetuses, and the connecting cords are unmistakably umbilical: an explicit symbol of creation.) It might be a little difficult to conceive of masses of people lining up to take part in the murky, icky, unfathomable game of the title. And of course the same sort of difficulty would apply as well to this, or to any, movie by Cronenberg. Who could possibly enjoy such a thing? But if not exactly an enjoyable movie, this is nevertheless an impressive one. You have to hand it to Cronenberg -- no matter how urgently you might want afterwards to wash your hand -- for his resourcefulness in finding outlets for his obsessions with flesh, bone, internal organs, decay, rot, disease. The unspoken suggestion of STDs, in particular, takes us back to the metaphorical undercurrents of They Came from Within and Rabid, in the director's early, pre-AIDS period. And it verges on the jaw-dropping what he is able to get away with by working with symbols: lubrication of an orifice, then penetration of the orifice, depicted in a perfectly matter-of-fact manner simply because the site is a few inches removed from fig-leaf territory. Most impressive of all, however, is the way in which the movie holds the line against the rising tide of special effects in the genre. Cronenberg grants entrée to a solitary little two-headed mutant lizard, rummages up a small handful of slimy, innardsy props, and unveils a frightening new surgical instrument (a technological advance on the custom-designed gynecological tools of Dead Ringers), but he never permits the tail, as the saying goes, to wag the dog. He wants only as much as he needs, and the result is far more SF than FX. The two are not synonymous. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Ian Holm, Willem Dafoe. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd