When I was a kid, I was stoked to see Brainscan. Not only was it hyped to the moon and back, even Entertainment Tonight was pushing it as some kind of historic cross between horror and modern technology. I wasn’t disappointed, either. The teenage characters were addicted to gore flicks (Who’s that remind you of?), the sets were dressed with piles of Fangoria, and there was just enough violence to keep its intended audience—me—entertained.
Terminator 2’s Edward Furlong plays Michael, the kind of outsider who would be the cops’ first suspect if his school ever got shot up. Moodiness aside, I really identified with Michael; I still want to live in his hyper-nineties, pseudo-cyberpunk bedroom, playing CD-ROMs all day while using a voice-activated interface that puts Siri to shame. Why would a teenager need his own refrigerator, especially when his mother’s dead and his father’s never home? Because fuck the rest of the house, that’s why. That attic bedroom is the tits and I would live in it forever.
Although Michael used to love horror, he’s grown blasé on the genre. He turns cynical whenever video game companies market their “terrifying experiences” and he talks about his favorite movies with all the enthusiasm of someone going through a divorce. By the time he gets his hands on a copy of the video game Brainscan, he rolls his eyes like the angsty little punk he is. The game ends up blowing his mind (never mind the seizure it caused) and he raves about it to his metalhead friend (his only friend) on the way to school the next day.
In a plot twist no one didn’t see coming, Brainscan’s depictions of murder seem so real because they are real. Michael finds out he unwittingly killed a man during a trance and spends the rest of the movie covering up the crime. Each cover-up requires an additional cover-up and so on and so forth. I’m afraid I’m making this sound cleverer than it is, but it’s not not clever, either. Just average clever, I’d say.
That’s when the Trickster enters the picture, played by T. Ryder Smith. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s okay. The film’s marketing department wanted you to believe this guy was a big deal. The impish psycho is a cross between Freddy Krueger and a bad MTV veejay. Smith, who was previously a stage actor, doesn’t necessarily suck in the role, but he feels miscast. No amount of guitar riffs and scenery-chewing antics will convince you this guy’s comfortable in the role of a bad ass, nor will you believe he’s actually eating raw chicken as advertised in the aforementioned Entertainment Tonight promo.
The film’s really punching above its weight when it folds in Frank Langella as a surprisingly likable detective. Whereas all the other adults are either missing in action or portrayed as clueless squares (Parents just don’t understand, right, fellow kids?), Langella gives maximum effort and it shows. Other portions of the movie are surprisingly mature, too, which is why I give it a cautious recommendation.
Whenever Brainscan gets odd, you just have to remind yourself: “Because the nineties.” The oddest thing about Brainscan is probably the subplot. The filmmakers go for a Judy Blume approach to teenage sexuality, which comes off as creepy by today’s standards. See, Michael secretly video tapes his high school crush whenever she gets undressed in her bedroom window. At first you think the film means to damn his voyeuristic proclivities as a despicable character flaw, but later the filmmakers make it clear it’s supposed to be romantic. I guess if you’re as vapid as these teens are, it would be kind of romantic, but that’s missing the point.
Despite the film’s many misses, it gets a lot of points for effort. Yes, they were being just a little too derivative of Nightmare on Elm Street sequels and yes, there are so many holes in the plot they begin to form clover shapes. Yet where so many other “serious” horror flicks miss the mark, Brainscan is only a near miss. I really enjoyed it at times and managed to keep my snickering to a minimum. It could very well be the fulcrum point between eighties slasher flicks and the nineties abundance of Scream knock-offs. That alone is interesting for historical purposes.
The Goug' Blog 