Director: Ed Hunt
Starring: Tom Bresnahan, David Gale, Cynthia Preston
Year: 1988
The Brain is 1/3 fun, 1/3, boring, and 1/3 plain disastrous, making for a bizarrely bumpy ride that you feel nauseous after experiencing. It’s a good idea given absolutely nowhere to go and no talent to take it there, a fun- house five minutes that you regret when you leave. Still, how often do you see a giant brain monster with teeth start eating people it can’t mind-control? Hopefully for your sake, not very.
In a small town, in a small high school, Jim gets caught being a teenage hooligan and is sent to the local “psychologist” to get help. This strange man, Dr. Blakely, hosts a TV show that supposedly is meant to help his viewers deal with the world’s problems by thinking for themselves. However, what’s really happening is that a giant alien brain is using the airwaves to control people, and those it can’t take over begin to have murderous hallucinations. Not fun.
The story is kinda cool; the lab, the alien, the show, the mind control, our hero. But that’s all we’ve got, that’s surface level, and it’s not awful, the acting is even fine, but it never goes anywhere from there. The rest of the film (the majority, sadly) is either really dull or really dumb. I swear, whole extended scenes go by and all they did was run, or drive, or run after driving, or get shot at while running and probably wishing they could drive. It’s pretty ridiculous, and pretty stupid, when the alien thing is what we should be focusing on, Jim & his adventure too. The editing is bizarre, the flow terrible, a hundred things went wrong, and the only piece that’s solid is the base story, which is entertaining, but not entertaining enough.
My rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆