Brain Dead Reviews

Dr. Rex Martin (Bill Pullman) is a "brain man," a doctor whose research specialty is isolating the physical causes of mental illness. Jim Reston (Bill Paxton) is a sleek corporate Mephistopheles whose shallow, opportunistic career plan depends on the mathematical genius of one Dr. Jack Halsey (Bud Cort). The problem: Halsey has gone mad, murdered his wife and children, and been locked away in a facility for the criminally insane. Halsey is gripped by a dazzling array of paranoid hallucinations, the most persistent of which is that he is being followed by a man in a bloodstained white suit, the man who really murdered his family. Reston and his employers, the executives of the sinister Eunice Corporation, want the equations Halsey was working on before his breakdown. If they can't have them, they want to make sure no one else gets them either; the one thing they don't really care about is what happens to Halsey. Reston offers Martin a deal: Eunice Corporation's ongoing financial support and the opportunity to do ground-breaking research on a human subject, in return for a small favor. Martin must perform an experimental surgical procedure on Halsey in the hope that the mathematician can be returned to rationality; if he can't be made sane, however, Reston wants Halsey's memory wiped clean. Martin struggles with the sticky ethics of the situation, and finally agrees to perform the operation. The procedure seems to be a success, but Martin suddenly finds himself haunted by the imaginary man in white. Is he real, or is Martin losing his mind as well? Martin later sees--or thinks he sees--his wife, Dana (Patricia Charbonneau), and Reston making love, then finds them dead and a weapon in his own hand. As the logic of the everyday world seems to unravel, Martin finds himself in a mental institution where the staff insists on calling him Dr. Halsey. After a series of increasingly bizarre encounters in the hospital, Martin wakes up to find himself under the knife; he has, the surgeon explains, been in a serious car accident and is undergoing brain surgery. As Dana and Reston watch from behind glass, Martin dies before the operation is completed. A low-budget exploitation picture with big ideas, BRAIN DEAD uses the conventions of the horror movie to pull off a cinematic sleight of hand many movies with far more material resources have failed to make work. Its narrative is an embedded one, a tangle of dreams and fantasies and hallucinations forever turning in on themselves until it's impossible to tell at any given moment where the primary narrative is in relation to what's on the screen. This is usually the province of European art films--think of Woiciech Has' THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT--but BRAIN DEAD stumbles only occasionally as it pitches to a genre audience while treading the thin line between cleverness and being too tricky for its own good. The overall effect is vertiginous but titillating, and first-time director Adam Simon makes the most of the original story by veteran Roger Corman collaborator Charles Beaumont (QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE; LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS; and many, many others). Catherine Hardwicke's production design delivers some surprisingly high-quality goods on a low budget, and the above-average cast helps position BRAIN DEAD head and shoulders above most exploitation vehicles. Pullman (THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW), Paxton (ALIENS; NEAR DARK), Charbonneau (DESERT HEARTS), and cult favorite Bud Cort (HAROLD AND MAUDE) all deliver far better than passable performances, with Paxton the standout as the embodiment of sleek corporate wickedness. BRAIN DEAD provides a strong argument for the existence of exploitation movies: a picture that entertains the lowest-common-denominator viewer while giving more sophisticated moviegoers the thrill of discovering a diamond in the rough. (Nudity, sexual situations, violence.)