bruiser

Although I'm a big Romero fan , I avoided renting this for a while because it looked like yet another invisible man movie, and I heard that it wasn't very good. Bruiser is about a guy called Henry, who has really lost his identity, and zest for life. Everyone walks all over him. His co-workers don't seem to know he exists, his boss treats him like garbage, his best freind is stealing from him, and to top it all off, his wife is sleeping with his boss. One morning, he wakes up to find that he has no face anymore , and that he has finally lost his identity and individuality. He catches the maid stealing money in his living room ( does this guy know any decent people?) , and kills her. This sends him on a destructive path of revenge , as he brutally kills everyone who's ever wronged him , and he gets a little more of his identity back with each murder.

This isn't a great Romero film , but is still worth a look if you enjoyed other Romero efforts like Monkey Shines, and Martin. In fact , this reminded me a lot of Martin, and even featured a talkback radio program like the one out of that movie. This was a pretty dark revenge movie. Some of Henrys revenge fantasies , like the one where he pushes a rude commuter under a train really added to the shock value. Bruiser has a very dark, depressing feel to it, something that Romero is very adept at injecting into a film. For the most part , the performances are pretty organic, and believable, but I often found myself laughing at Peter Stormares overacting performance as Henrys boss. It really detracted from the overall feel. The movie has also been instantly dated by the very eighties looking nightclub scene at the end , which seems to have been hastily written purely as a promotional tool for the band The Misfits. This end scene was very unsatisfying , and will look laughably bad in years to come.....kind of the equivalent of featuring Milli Vanilli in a scene.

Henrys bosses fate is pretty laughable too. The guy gets strung up in the nightclub , and Henry burns holes through him with some kind of disco laser ( I'm not kidding). This does have quite a few redeeming scenes however, and the actual concept was a good one. It was probably a blow to Romero that the similarly themed Paul Verhoeven movie Hollow Man was not only released before Bruiser, but was also torn to shreds by the critics. I can imagine that as a result , no distributor wanted to touch Romeros finished product, especially given the fact that it is really just an o.k. movie at best. Still , it does have its moments, and has that pretty cool Tales From The Darkside feel to it, and its always good to support Romero anyway, so rent this out on a quiet night, turn the lights out, and go into this with an open mind.