Brain Dead (1990)

I am quite aware of the memes involving confusion between Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton.  Long before the internet was a thing, there was a strange movie that actually starred both of them. 

Rex Martin (Pullman) is a respected neurosurgeon that has an office full of brains.  He hooks the brains up to a face to see what responses he gets, and so far he has had some success, specifically in figuring out what part of the brain causes paranoia.

The studies are funded by a grant from a large corporation called Eunice, of which his best friend Jim Reston (Paxton) is a board member.  Eunice has a problem: a mathematician named Jack Halsey (Bud Cort) has suffered a psychological breakdown.  He killed his entire family and was committed to a mental institution, where he believes Ramsen (Nicholas Pryor), the doctor in charge, is his boss Conklin from a mattress store at which he is an accountant.  He also believes that Conklin is a man in a bloody white suit that has been following him around.

Martin befriends Halsey and does some experiment, confirming his brain matches the pattern of someone with acute paranoia.  Jim informs Rex that the next step is for him to step beyond theories and actually operate on Halsey to restore his sanity so that the corporation can retrieve the missing parts of an equation from him.  Martin is reluctant, but does the surgery in order to make sure he does not lose his grant.  The operation is such a success that Jim pitches the next step to Vance (George Kennedy), Eunice's chairman: a chain of offices where people can have their personality flaws erased.

Problem is, Martin is now seeing the man in the bloody white suit, and his mental state after the surgery becomes fragile, resulting in a disastrous dinner with Vance and Jim in order to discuss the idea of elective brain surgery.  He also becomes sure that Jim, previously his romantic rival, is having an affair with his wife Dana (Patricia Charbonneau).  He returns home to find them in the act, only to see them murdered by the man in the bloody clothes.

Rex wakes up in an insane asylum, where the man has regained his personality and Dr. Ramsen, who apparently is treating Martin.  He tries to convince Martin that his life as a neurosurgeon is made up, and that Halsey and he are the same person.  Meanwhile, Eunice, believing Martin to be Halsey, attempts to the surgery on him in order to get the equation.  However, it is possible that even this is an illusion, as Rex may be dying from injuries sustained in an accident, which from his viewpoint involved a homeless man. 

The movie was based on a script by Twilight Zone writer Charles Beaumont that was sitting among a number of different scripts that Roger Corman had been holding onto.  Adam Simon chose this one as the best among them, and decided to make a feature film.

There are some interesting elements here involving what is and is not consciousness, as well as some typical horror elements.  Fans of David Lynch may also be shocked (or not so shocked) at how much this in some ways resembles Lost Highway, even though Brain Dead, despite its twists and turns, is quite a bit more linear. 

The parts that do work are undone by some truly hammy acting from Bud Cort and a feeling that Simon did not know exactly how to stretch this out into a movie.  I can see where this would have worked as a half-hour Twilight Zone episode.  As a cheap horror movie it does not contain enough thrills to keep the viewer engaged.  It's really more of a curiosity in the career of both of the Bills.

Brain Dead (1990)
Time: 85 minutes
Starring: Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton, Bud Cort, Nicholas Pryor
Director: Adam Simon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more