M. Hackers (1995) - Crash and Burn!

2025-10-23
For the IndieWeb Movie Club for October 2025 hosted by Benji.

They skated, they hacked, the Crashed and Burned! Back when the internet was the wild wild west and the graphics were unrestrained fun. You can tell the designers had so much fun with this movie.

I'm ranking this as a solid 3/5 star movie. I thought it was pretty slow going and thought it was absolutely dumb with the eye blazing 3D graphics. The graphics were still pretty hard to stand even by the end but at least the dumb rollerblading everywhere grew on me. I thought he was the odd one out but no, they all seemed to be making fun and fast getaways on rollerblades. It's really fun by the ending scene where they are all in their pay booths and just sending out attacks left and right. Big fan of the team work!!

The midpoint plot where Crash and Burn make the police officer's life a living hell was chaotically teenager of them. One upping each other to rewriting the life of this guy is just comedic.

Other misc thoughts

• What, Penn Jillette is in this movie! I saw him and thought he was super familiar and he was!
• A lot of people comment on Matthew Gillard and on Letterboxd and how this is Scooby Doo but computer nerds instead. I totally see it ahahah
• Apparently this movie had a hacker consult on the production so the scenes are at least partially based on reality which is fun! It was probably the teen hacker culture of using phone boxes and the like. For example, Mark Abene was in jail for a year for hacking under the name Phiber Optik.
• I liked this interview with the director! He is so funny, "real hackers were so boring" so he gave them punk aesthetics instead. I wonder how many hackers rollerbladed back in the day?