Brain Dead

(1990) dir. Adam Simon
viewed: 01/08/08

This film was leftover in my queue from Halloween, kind of like that candy that never gets eaten.  I actually queue up a lot of movies, 411 at last count from Netflix.  And I move them around.  I try to go for themes and connections sometimes, but I also like variety.  So, I’d left Brain Dead in the upper part of my queue despite it no longer being Halloween.

It turns out, not that I would have suspected otherwise, that it’s a film that I probably saw back in the early 1990′s on video at some point.  It stars Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, moderately early in their careers, certainly before they achieved higher levels of stardom and filmmaking.  It’s funny, too, because this film feels more 1980′s than 1990, but that’s part of its charm.  This is the kind of movie that doesn’t seem to get made anymore.

It’s a horror film, but much more of a psychological horror film, not without humor or camp.  Pullman is a brain surgeon at a university, who is much more interesting in toying with brains in jars than with ones in humans.  The movie poster takes its signiture image from a brief early moment in the film: a human face is stretched out on some wired platform, and the scientists prod parts of a brain attached to it with electrodes to make it twitch and wink.  This never comes up again, but it is interesting.

Paxton’s character is a friend of Pullman’s, who convinces Pullman to toy with the brain of a now insane scientist/accountant, played by the inimitable Bud Cort.  Cort has gone insane and the parent company for whom he worked is trying to extract some lost information from him.  A car crash occurs, throwing Pullman into a nightmare dream state, conflating his life and identity with Cort’s institutionalized cuckoos.  From that point on, the film cuts from one scenario to another, into new rooms, different locations, varying tortures.  It’s a headtrip sort of film more than anything.  And it works, largely, especially with its earnest low-budget charm.

Adapted from a story by Charles Beaumont, one of The Twilight Zone‘s top writers, its more substantive and clever in its off-beat perspective than a lot of films of the genre and period, and certainly unlike anything being produced these days.