Best selling science fiction author David Norton is invited to a conference in a beautiful Mallorca hotel. David soon becomes aware that he's been dragged into something big and dangerous when people around him start committing suicide, including his fiancée, after receiving a strange phone call.The Kovac Box is a rather good movie, it's just a little forgettable, it could have been something rather good, it's just a little lacking in imagination and style, but on the whole it's a good mix of thriller and sci fi. The ending I found a little frustrating.Great music throughout, in keeping with the film, really lovely location filming, and well acted, Timothy Hutton puts in a very good and solid performance as Hutton. Also some interesting moments in the film which make you question what's going on. Overall still a worthy 7/10

I like Timothy Hutton and the casting was good, especially David Kelly. I started out digging the intro scenes rapidly bringing on the mystery. It was a little derivative, but the plot rapidly started to fall apart. I'm not going to give a direct spoiler, but I am going to observe that if you want a (hungry, always hungry) author to write something, rather than resort to intricate deadly violent methods, all you have to do is tell the author what you want and PAY HIM! The plot holes were so many and so deep that the main characters were calling attention to them as a plot device! So maybe the movie is worth watching as an example of how well people can put nonsense together and make it appealing.My theory? The writer/ producers were having too much fun in Mallorca to read their own script.

I'm not sure I've seen the 'Gloomy Sunday' reference explained here. 'Gloomy Sunday' was written by Hungarian composer Rezső Seress in 1933. The song is legendary for (allegedly) causing people to commit suicide after hearing it. Check out Wikipedia (search 'Gloomy Sunday') for the very interesting background on the song.As for the movie, I really thought it was first-rate. I found it at the video store, and got it thinking it might at least entertain me. It did more than that - the plot had me hooked from the first five minutes on.A "Kovak Box" is explained in the movie, but that itself is a reference to the "Skinner Box" of B.F. Skinner. This article, which comes from Snopes.com provides some very interesting background tidbits to the movie - you will recognize where certain plot elements come from - http://www.snopes.com/science/skinner.asp.If you like movies with a lot of intrigue, this is a great one to rent.

If you have any reverence for the recordings of Billie Holiday, this film should strike you as outrageous in its exploitive use of her recording of 'Gloomy Sunday' as the triggering mechanism for mass suicide. But, truth to tell, I was absolutely enthralled by a pulp Science Fiction film that becomes more hilariously preposterous, scene by scene. Disjointed, illogical, derivative, boringly repetitive, here is a film that might have best been broken up into serial chapters and shown a chapter at a time, were it still the double feature / short subject 40s. Timothy Hutton plays the lead with complete command of all the nuances allowed to someone who operates out of the wooden Indian school of acting. This film should serve to nail the coffin lid securely down on the corpse of his cinematic acting career. The damsels in distress (there are two of them) are comely but always allowed to wander off and get into trouble, which necessitates rescue by our hero. There are those who have detected a Hitchcockian aroma wafting from this film, but that only brings into question Hitchcock's dubious and inflated reputation.