# Brain Dead (1990)

### reviewed by
Dennis Schwartz

BRAIN DEAD (director/writer: Adam Simon; screenwriter: from a Charles Beaumont story; cinematographer: Ron Schmidt; editor: Carol Oblath; cast: Bill Pullman (Dr. Rex Martin), Bill Paxton (Jim Reston), Patricia Charbonneau (Dana Martin), Bud Cort (Jack Halsey), George Kennedy (Vance), Nicholas Pryor (Conklin/Ramsen), David Sinaiko (Berkovitch), 1990)

    Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Brain Dead is adapted from an intelligent story by Charles Beaumont, a former writer for the "Twilight Zone" series, who died in 1967. This chilling tale left a lot to be desired and despite having an intelligence and originality to it, it degenerated into a jejune work, more of a display of style over substance. I felt cheated by its wearisome ploy of not decifering what was a dream and what was reality, feeling more like I was being manipulated than I was at being treated to something special.

In a positive vein, this low-budget film kept moving at a swift pace and the story was conceivable to a point. The film managed to hold my interest until about the halfway point, when too much of the same interplay between dreams and reality was never made clear, so much so that I stopped suspending disbelief, which is tantamount to pulling the life support on one of these flicks and rendering it brain dead.

The story opens with a brain research scientist (he is also a brain surgeon), Dr. Rex Martin (Pullman) and his assistant Berkovitch, experimenting in their science lab on dead brains, where they keep jars of them stored in shelves along the wall. Pullman's old friend and college competitor, a slippery marketer for a large corporation called Eunice, Jim Reston (Paxton), visits his office and presents him with an opportunity to make a name for himself in science and become rich. He is aware that Martin developed a technology to alter personalities and to re-sculpture memory, by fiddling with one's reality. Reston's idea is that they can sell this to the public as a product and open up clinical salons, with people able to change their personalities to the one's they want. The slogan for the product would be: The new you from Eunice.

Reston also tells him he has a fresh brain available for him to use his ideas on, to see if they actually work. The person he is talking about, is a one-time genius mathematician who worked for the Eunice corporation (or he could be an accountant in Conklin's mattress firm), Dr. Halsey (Cort). He is a paranoid psychopath, who killed his wife and two children and three lab assistants, for apparently no reason, and pleaded insanity. He's now in a private mental institution, Lakeside, where he denies everything. But, he holds some invaluable numbers that he was working on for Eunice, that Reston says is classified information. It is further explained to Martin, that these are numbers we do not want to get into anyone else's hands. The proposition is, that we get you a meeting with him and you get to do brain surgery on him, and if you can manipulate his thought process so we get the three numbers we need, fine. But if he should go brain dead, that's fine too. Eunice's corporate head (Kennedy) agrees to this plan. As loopy as the story is from here, it is the most sense it will make, because everything gets more confusing from here on, after Martin visits the harmless but paranoic Halsey in Lakeside.

When Martin leaves the sanitarium, he is walking in the street with a jar that has a brain in it and a homeless man attacks him, claiming that's his brain. In the course of the struggle for the brain, a car runs over Martin. He falls into a world of nightmares, madness, and paranoia, where rationality is lost sight of. It plays like an episode derived from the "Twilight Zone," as Dr. Martin's technology is now being experimented on him.

Martin's dreams include: seeing Jim making love to his lovely wife (Charbonneau ) in the nude; that he is really Halsey; that the doctor who is treating him is from Lakeside, Dr. Ramsen (Pryor), who gives him shock treatments and applies to him the same surgery procedure he used on Halsey; and, that his life is completely disorientated, at one moment he is Martin, at another he is Halsey, and the nightmare keeps changing every ten minutes or so, so that the viewer is totally confused. There are also dreams within the dreams, adding more confusion, until the film ends on a dull conventional note, after all the expections of something radical being promised.

The film didn't do much for me, as it was not worth putting in all the effort to watch it, as the payoff seemed too little. But the dream sequences were scary and the film had an intelligent approach to its horror rather than the usual exploitive one...if only it made more sense! Pullman seemed believable as someone losing sense of reality, while Paxton was robotic in his role, playing it without feeling. All the other performances were as forgettable as the film.

    REVIEWED ON 5/3/2000      GRADE: C

Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"

    http://www.sover.net/~ozus

    ozus@sover.net

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ

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