Horror Movie Review: Brain Dead (1990)
Dr. Martin's life is plunged into a chaotic nightmare in which he will be forced to confront and question everything he understands about reality.
Brain Dead, not to be confused with Braindead (1992) is a horror film directed by Adam Simon, releasing in 1990.
Dr. Rex Martin (Bill Pullman) is a top neurosurgeon, who is active in studying brain malfunctions that cause mental illnesses. High school friend Jim Reston shows up at Rex’s office. He requires Martin’s aid in reaching the mind of John Halsey, a former genius mathematician who once…
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Carnosaur (1993) didn’t have to go this hard with these shots but i’m glad they did
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The American Nightmare was released on February 9, 2001(Los Angeles, California).
#AdamSimon
#Horror #Documentary
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Brain Dead (1990)
My rating: 5/10
Eh, Star Trek did it better. I like the funky little end credits song, though.
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W A T C H I N G
Frank Grillo is so criminally underrated.
I can't understand why these fucking executives at Fox didn't want him in the main character role!
Joe Carnahan severed his ties with Fox on this film to keep Frank Grillo in it. As he'd re-written the script with Grillo specifically in mind.
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Ghost: How many kids do you have?
Graves: I don’t have any-
Ghost, looking at the several Shadows behind Graves: Fuck- You got pregnant that many times??
Graves:
Graves: *stares blankly at Ghost, mouth hanging open with only a broken, very confused noise coming out*
Shadow 10: Holy shit- The Ghost broke the Commander
Shadow 13: WHEN DID HE GIVE BIRTH TO ME??
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Brain Dead (1990)
While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...
On the VHS cover of Brain Dead, it reads “From the writer of the original Twilight Zone comes the most terrifying film of the decade.” It’s a gross exaggeration as this is hardly a frightening film but it also explains this picture’s biggest fault. At 85 minutes, it’s way too long but had it lasted the length of a TV episode, it would’ve had potential.
Neurosurgeon Dr. Rex Martin (Bill Pullman) is asked by his old friend Jim (Bill Paxton) to perform experimental surgery on John Halsey (Bud Cort), a former genius mathematician who lost his mind. After the procedure is successful, Martin begins having the same visions that plagued his patient.
For a while, I gave this film the benefit of the doubt. I wasn’t sure where it was headed and was curious. I spotted a few things that, I assumed, foreshadowed the film’s ending – a sign on a truck that referenced one of John’s hallucinations, a strange parallel between his testimonies and Rex’s life, hints that perhaps there was more to his stay in a mental asylum than just irrational paranoia. I’ll give Brain Dead credit for keeping the audience guessing, at least for a while, but this also works against the film. This is one of those stories whose ending is impossible to figure out. To pad out the running time, writers Charles Beaumont and Adam Simon (who also directs) pull out one new twist after another. What if Rex and John are actually split personalities within the same body? What if Rex is the patient and John is the doctor? What if Rex is imagining the whole thing and everything John told him, is a warning of what’s to come? What if John was never sick and the Man in a Bloody White Suit (Nicholas Pryor) is real? What if X was Y? What if Z was W?!
This picture is a living contradiction. You can't guess where it's headed but Brain Dead (which is not to be confused with the Peter Jackson zombie flick) is also so determined to keep you guessing it makes what’s happening obvious. The exact details may escape you, but Rex’s descent from a rational person to a drooling lunatic is so rapid and so much time is spent on hallucinations and paranoid ravings that you stop caring. You just wait for time to run out and the reveal to come, which turns out, basically makes everything you saw previously pointless. It might as well have been a dream, and not in a way that’s clever or amusing.
You may be wondering about that weird stretched-out face prominently featured in the advertisements. Why haven’t I mentioned it yet? Because it’s hardly in the film. This picture features no body horror unless you count people getting their brains poked and prodded in a live theatre. That intriguing visual is a device used to measure how different parts of the brain are attached to different facial features/muscles. It's briefly featured at the beginning of the picture and then gone. It’s the freakiest part of the whole film so they put it front and center, hoping to lure in chumps. Don’t make the same mistake as me. Brain Dead is a forgettable picture that’s got nothing new to bring to the equation and little to say. (On VHS, April 29, 2018)
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