“I don’t know how we’re going to explain all of this, but I think you were right; we need to call the police.”
Quadrant is the most recent inheritor of the inimitable B-movie stylings of Full Moon Features, a venerable production company with roots in the eighties. Full Moon is responsible for a long run of shlock-horror titles, including the Trancers series, the Subspecies films, and the Puppet Master movies. However, the low-budget legerdemain that has served Full Moon for so long seems to have lost its luster with the release of 2024’s Quadrant, a movie with some good ideas that are buried beneath surface clutter and manifested in a mediocre and muddled manner.
Written by C. Courtney Joiner and directed by Charles Band, Quadrant is a respooling of a Jack the Ripper tale wrapped in quasi-Cyberpunk trappings. It’s a mash-up of pre-existing concepts with plot elements of the 1992 Pierce Brosnan vehicle The Lawnmower Man present, conceits corralled out of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 thunderbolt of a movie, Strange Days in the mix, along with elements of 1999’s The Matrix, fragments of Satoshi Kon’s 2006 masterpiece, Paprika, a smattering of 2010’s Inception mixed with a pinch of Amazon’s 2022 show, The Peripheral, some Star Trek holodeck theorizing and the cosmic horror of Redjac from Trek’s TOS episode Wolf in the Fold. Unfortunately, Quadrant doesn’t hew close enough to the facts of the actual series of killings in London’s East End in 1888 or even some of the more fantastical retellings of that sordid sequence of events, like From Hell, the 2001 Hughes brothers film based on the Alan Moore graphic novel that purported to name a suspect and come up with a plausible motive for the multiple, gruesome Whitechapel murders.
Jack the Ripper, also known as Saucy Jack, was the name given to a serial killer who stalked the streets of Victorian London, killing five prostitutes between August 31st and November 9th in 1888. The Ripper had a distinct Modus Operandi where the victim’s throat would be slashed nearly to the bone and organs would be removed from the torso and lower abdomen. Several letters were sent to Scotland Yard taunting the police, the most famous of which had a return address marked, “From Hell”.
Quadrant stars Shannon Helene Barnes, Christian Carrigan, Emma Reinagel, and Rickard Claeson with Kristephan Warren-Stevens as Jack the Ripper.
“This is a medical device built for subjects to go through mental catharsis, not to use it like a ride from Disneyland!”
Harry (Claeson) is a burned-out hustler of a scientist who has crafted a device called the Quadrant along with his partner, Meg (Reinagel). The Quadrant is a mental interface that allows a patient to explore their traumas, fears, and harmful memories and interact with them in a virtual-reality simulation which will hopefully allow the patient to conquer their fears and get on with their lives. Harry has poured almost all his resources into the Quadrant, and it shows. He’s nearly at the end of his rope. His shoddy lab is smoke-filled and filthy. The hard-drinking Harry presents like a noir detective, clad in suspenders and trench coat, his hands equally comfortable with manipulating his gauges in his lab or grabbing his gun. Meg is a spring wound too tightly. A femme-not-so-fatale, her high heels and black minidress are inartfully concealed beneath her long, white lab coat. One of their test subjects is a man-mouse named Bob (Carrigan) who is constantly plagued by ill-defined anxieties and horrendous nightmares. Harry is prescribing Bob his own designer drug cocktail with hallucinogenic properties to make Bob more pliable for his Quadrant sessions as well as assuaging his anxieties when he’s in the real world. The former works much better than the latter for Bob who is a walking bundle of cringe and nerves, a stammering apology with legs.
A young woman named Erin (Helene Barnes), signs on as a paid volunteer and her first session exposes a deep obsession with the Whitechapel killer, Jack the Ripper. Though she is told not to touch anything in her monochromatic, greyscale virtual world, just moments after Erin enters the East End, she is confronted by the Ripper, who hands her a long-bladed dagger.
Meg pulls her out of the session and is somewhat alarmed at Erin’s claim that she wasn’t driven by fear so much as sexual excitement. “Kind of a turn-on”. Erin admits that her goal is to put together a True-Crime novel driven by new information she can glean from the Quadrant, despite Harry and Meg protesting that the Quadrant can only show a person what’s in their head already, building off of pre-existing memories instead of creating fresh experiences. Also, the goal of a Quadrant session is to burn fear out of a subject yet Erin doesn’t seem scared at all. Despite having literally just used the device, Erin is sent out with Bob who is instructed by Harry to get her up to speed on the Quadrant. Erin is also eager to ask about the two enigmatic scientists. As the pair of patients leave, unnoticed by all, LEDs on the Quadrant headpiece stutter silently.
Meg is getting a bad vibe off of Erin, who is literally telling them that she plans to exploit her Quadrant experience and not be helped by it; Meg’s fears meet Harry’s deaf ears who isn’t listening to anyone, lost in fantasies of financial success if he can just prove that Quadrant works right. Not paying the slightest bit of attention to his partner, he thinks Erin could be the perfect spokesperson to help sell Quadrant to the masses.
After wheedling her session pay from Harry, Erin donates it to a street busker and then takes Bob to her well-appointed home next door to a cemetery. He’s stunned to discover almost every available surface in the house covered with Jack the Ripper books, maps, and memorabilia ranging from the kitsch to the creepy and is concerned as he sees how deep her infatuation goes.
The next time Erin enters the Quadrant, it’s she who is clad in the Ripper’s cloak, and she who is stalking prostitutes in the black and white streets of London. Encountering a winsome woman of the night, Erin propositions the dainty and doe-eyed blonde who docilely follows Erin into the darkness and to her demise. After stripping, the blonde delicately snogs Erin, only to have the cloak-clad Erin respond with a savage spate of stabbing and cutting that splatters crimson blood across the grayscale room.
The Quantum sessions aren’t helping Bob and he doesn’t know what to do with himself or with Erin. Meg warns him about staying away from Erin, but no one in this film listens to Meg. She should’ve been named Cassandra. In the back of the lab, the lights on the Quadrant unit flicker again.
In the dark of night, Erin meets up with the busker and offers to buy her dinner. Things proceed as things do and Erin takes her back to her house overlooking the graveyard. They kiss, they strip, things get hot and heavy and then Erin ends everything with a berserk and frenzied knife attack. She kills the girl, covering herself and her immediate vicinity with viscera and guts.
Noticing the activity on the Quadrant’s housing this time, Meg shares her concerns with Harry who not only completely brushes her off but drugs her insensate, just completely sedating her against her will. When she comes to, she threatens to slice up Harry’s face if he ever slips her a mickey again but stays working at the lab. Meanwhile, Bob and Erin discuss their experiences in the Quadrant. Erin tells him that instead of not fighting his fears as Harry has instructed, Erin confronts hers and that he could do the same, that she could help him. She also confides with him that she has some sort of connection to the Quadrant and without wearing the headpiece, they share one of her Ripper visions. In the simulation, he acts as her assistant and accomplice, and the two assault and murder another prostitute.
Later, while driving alone, he again feels that same strange connection in his head. Pulling over, he sees Erin escorting yet another young woman down an alley. When screaming erupts, he makes a bee line for the lab, laying out his fears for Harry and Meg to hear.
Is it too late? Can Bob stop Erin from committing more murders? Can Harry understand that people shouldn’t be test subjects and that patients should come before profits? Can Meg get anyone to listen to her before disaster strikes? Can Erin be pulled back from the edge before her Quadrant-enabled obsessions swallow her whole? Can anyone or anything prevent the Victorian Era’s true face of terror from running amok in the modern world? Watch Quadrant to find out.
“I don’t judge what’s crazy.”
“So you’re perfect.”
Quadrant has a few problems. It’s not Cyberpunky enough to be a good Cyberpunk film. It’s not scary enough to be a good horror film. It professes to be a Ripper-genre film but only displays a surface-level understanding of the Ripper murders (if that). There’s really no one to root for. Who is the protagonist? The survivors are as much victims of the plot as they are the villains.
The ultra-flat depiction of the East End has a real Sin City flavor to it, reminding this reviewer of Robert Rodriguez’s ultra-stylized, black-and-white 2005 film, but that uncanny ultra-flatness is carried through every other environment Bob enters when he uses the Quadrant to face his own fears. The CG creations embodying Bob’s personal demons do not pass muster for a 2024 film. Effects like that wouldn’t be acceptable in the nineties. Also, Bob’s terrors are in full color, contrasting with Whitechapel. Though motion pictures were black and white until the middle of the last century, someone should tell the filmmakers over at Full Moon that London in the nineteenth century was, in fact, fully colorized IRL.
There were a lot of places in the film that would’ve been improved with the slightest bit of exposition. Some sort of technobabble defining the parameters of the Quadrant would’ve helped this reviewer make sense of some of the more incongruous plot points and string a rules-based lattice around the structure of the story. Why is it called the Quadrant?
The script felt like it was half-baked. Dialogue was a little clunky and too many lines were straight-up subtext without the thinnest trappings of text to drape over the characters’ needs. A few more editing passes or rewrites would’ve made the conversations seem smoother and more natural.
As Erin mentions in the movie, there is an entire industry creating Jack the Ripper products for the millions of people who are into Ripperology (for lack of a better term). In a meta sense, this film is part of that industry and trying to cater to those who are fans of that material. Here’s the problem with that: Quadrant is only superficially connected to that set of facts. Only one of the film’s Ripper-kills involves a throat-slash. Only two of the kills are of women; Only one is a prostitute. There is no larger motive, no taunting of the police. There ARE no police. This reviewer can’t see real Ripperologists being too interested in a film that has so little to do with actual Ripper mythos.
Once Erin progresses to the point that she and Bob are having Quadrant experiences far afield of the lab and all four characters have become tethered together by some sort of Quadrant-based (remote) link, the cables suspending my disbelief were straining mightily. In this reviewer’s mind, the movie could’ve recovered if, at the moment of the climax (or immediately afterwards), it was revealed that Erin was still in the Quadrant and her first session had never finished. It could’ve given Quadrant a great, twisted ending like that of 1990’s Jacob’s Ladder.
Ultimately, Quadrant has a few good ideas. Using a VR cyberspace construct to help psychiatric patients is clever. Imagining a killer from the past having free rein in the future is clever. Having a Victorian horror, the monster of his age, encountering an even bigger, more scary, more modern monster is clever. Unfortunately, Quadrant is hindered by its shoddy execution of those concepts.
Quadrant can be streamed on Prime Video, Tubi, and Full Moon Features 8/23/24, as well as available in physical form, DVD, Blu-ray, and VHS.
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