BRAIN TWISTERS (1991)

BRAIN TWISTERS (1991)

There is two ways to look at this movie. One of them immediately becomes obvious as soon as you start watching it: this is one low-budget godawful piece of shit. The other is that if you have an hour and a half to completely waste while heavily under the influence of alcohol or drugs, it is full of 'wtf's' and belly laughs because of it's absurdity.

There is a third option, and that is that this film is a prequel to Re-Animator, the backstory of Dr. Carl Hill before his Miskatonic days. The reason I say this is that the main bad guy, "Dr. Rothman" not only looks like a younger version of David Gale, he seems to have some of the same bizarre traits. This could be what Dr. Hill was like before he met Herbert West.

A wacked-out Professor Rothman at some college, somewhere, is doing experiments on his students with some sort of electronic visual brainwashing stimulus. It isn't really explained exactly what watching pixelated multi-colored designs while hearing weird electronic sounds is supposed to test for, but it makes all the students psychotic, and they start killing people. The professor starts testing it on himself, which I assume is also supposed to explain his own bizarre behavior. One student kills his girlfriend and when he is confronted by the detective in the case he jumps out of a window to his death. The detective needs the body of one of the student-killers for fingerprints and 'evidence' but the company which is funding these experiments has already carted it away from the city morgue for the professor to do more experiments. When he gets to the university to pick up the body, the professor has already severed his head and put it in a bottle.

The detective is busy hitting on the girl who was the murder victim's best friend, and she also happens to work for Dr. Rothman in his office. This movie has many bizarre and unexplainable cliches which have you saying "wtf" to yourself, but not in a good way. The events that take place in this movie are slow going, you could fall asleep while waiting for something to happen, but when it does, it is so silly, this becomes one of those 'so bad it's good' films, as long as you can stay awake. The plot thickens halfway through the movie when the detective is thrown off the case because "Bio Inc." has some sort of conspiracy going on behind these experiments (though it doesn't seem to make sense since at the beginning of the movie, Rothman is pissed because Bio Inc. wants to cut his funding and shut down the research program...and later they're determined to keep the program going without Rothman.)

The acting is bad, the dialog is so bad it's funny, and one is never sure what exactly this evil corporation (or the government) is doing, except at the end, which is implied that "they" are going to implement this research into videogames to brainwash kids. This obscurity can be found cheaply on the 50-Movie DVD Set "Sci-Fi Invasion" which includes many other films I will be reviewing on this site. The quality of the videos is not so great, when they pack 5 movies onto one disc, you simply don't get decent digital quality. However, if you're looking to get a shit load of movies to watch while drunk, this is one movie which will do the trick for one of those nights.

I can't recommend this movie for it's "science fiction" premise, because it doesn't do a very good job of explaining things, although it does follow the cliches (which are interesting of themselves) of corporate/government agents spying on people from surveillance vans, weird electronic brainwashing, kids gone berserk for no reason, and silly scenes which simply baffle the mind as to what in the world the director/writers were thinking when they made this. It has a slightly better production value than INTERFACE, but because it isn't intentionally as funny, it depends on it's own badness for entertainment value.