David Gale was a fine man who could play some of the most convincing mad scientist roles to come out of the '80s-early-'90s b-movie scene. Of course we all remember the deceased Mr. Gale for his unforgettable turns as Dr. Carl Hill in the definitive mad scientist gore movies Re-Animator and Bride Of Re-Animator, and there are the few unfortunate amongst us to also remember him as Dr. Fulton Balcus in the Brian Yuzna produced The Guyver, his final role before his untimely demise at the unfriendly fangs of a heart attack... hey, don't look at me like that, it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do! I didn't cry when I had to split my own father's skull with a spade, but believe me, I cried like an eviscerated infant on August 18th, 1991! Anyway, one of David Gale's better mad genius roles is that of Dr. Anthony Blake in this often overlooked gem from the year that was 1988: The Brain!... well, I don't mean "gem" as in a big sparkly diamond or something THAT valuable, but more along the lines of an imperfect emerald or a REALLY nice cubic zirconium in a halfway decent setting.

But, what exactly is The Brain about you may wonder? Well, following his long overdue execution of his personal Gilligan, Pinky, Brain's latest scheme to conquer mankind involves the spiking of Chicago's water supply with X-tra Strength generic laxative products. Then, uhm, this somehow manipulates Mike Ditka under his the power of his swollen lobe, allowing Brain to maneuver Mike through the most dangerous game of all: politics. Eventually, Ditka becomes the president of the National Rifle Association and Mel Gibson winds up with a hypnotic tattoo of Danny Aiello on his ass... oh wait, that's an excerpt from the super secret unaired episode of the now defunct "Pinky & The Brain" series that was never finished because Phil Hartman's insane wife killed him before he could do the voices he had been selected for. As I was saying, this movie, The Brain is about the evils of the television industry and the brainwashing of America by popular entertainment. Dr. Anthony Blake (Gale) is the host of "Independent Thinking", which has become one of the biggest infomercial/self-help programs on Meadowvale cable access. Where's Meadowvale? Who the fuck cares, it's one of those shit stain armpit communities that nobody cares about. It's also the perfect place for a man and his big mutant brain to hypnotize and devour unsuspecting slobs. Recently there's been a rash of teenage suicides in Meadowvale, but they're not the results of your typical bouts of angst and parental pressures, as we find out when one such teenager kills her mother with a pair of scissors and then jumps out a window... all because of a bad hallucination involving slimy tentacles. So, the girls are being hypnotized into thinking they're in a new La Blue Girl movie are they?! But, for what purpose? Well, other than to fulfill some sick fanboy's perverse fantasies...

Now it's the time in the movie when we're introduced to our obligatory hero, Jim, who's more of an anti-hero, as he parks across TWO space in the parking lot at school and he sends explosive sodium down the toilets in the boys' room. Yes, he's the anti-hero, as brain eating do-gooders like Venom and gun wielding vigilantes like The Punisher have nothing on the dreaded Jim! Of course, Jim's not your average rebellious youngster, he's also got an IQ that is to him what Ron Jeremy's erect penis is to himself: it's really the only thing he's got going for him. I'm not an expert on the attractive factor of cinematic rebel types, but what little I do know tells me that Jim is far from being James Dean or Judd Nelson, so he better be smart, because his looks and charisma are in the red and his brains are all he's got... unless the Ron Jeremy comparison goes further than I intended it to... uggh, okay, that's enough about Ron Jeremy. Anyway, being the uncouth young lout he is, Jim makes the observation that this Dr. Blake "is a flake" per his own words, which comes as no surprise when he's set up for a session with the doc in an attempt to "straighten him out". Of course this "straightening" is to come at the ganglia of a large mutant brain that Blake has flopping around in a petrie dish! *Dramatic music here*! However, being the rebellious and intelligent hero, Jim doesn't go in for these back door brainwashing shenanigans and instead eludes the doctor's evil plans to control the minds of rebellious young geniuses and therefore putting an end to such teenybopper "freedom" fare as Footloose, Dirty Dancing and The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension... oh come on, you didn't think Peter Weller was at least a little rebellious? He was opposing John Lithgow after all, so what's the difference between him and Kevin Bacon?! Damn you people and your rebellious free thinking attitudes! Argh! "Argh" I say!

Anyway, Jim stays mind control free and escapes the compound, leaving Blake's over stimulated gray matter hungry for something, and it ain't knowledge it craves! Lashing out at the nearest disposable character, the disembodied organ makes a meal of one of Blake's assistants! As for Jim, he must be having mild hallucinations, because I could swear one of the gears on his car is "L", unless that's for "Ludicrous Speed". Make's me wonder if my car could possibly break the "Plaid" barrier... After making a scene at his woman Janet's hamburger stand (obviously the money maker in this relationship), Jim is dragged back to Blake's, where he immediately escapes with the help of a mentally unbalanced guy named Willy that looks like the unshaven cousin of David Schwimmer. In the escape though, Jim's Willy gets whacked by the man eating monster brain... his friend Willy of course, not his "little buddy" Willy. Also during the escape, we discover that Blake and his people aren't too afraid of any trouble with the authorities, as his hench goon Verna doesn't make a second thought of it as he hauls off and decapitates a cop with a fire axe when the pig gets involved! Mmmmm, looks like porkchops for dinner at the Blake household tonight. Hope Verna remembers to pick up applesauce on the way home... Now free, it's up to Jim and Janet to stop Blake from using the brain to unfairly give his show a ratings advantage over the other fine cable access programming in Meadowvale... and to stop them from making people kill each other in a bid for world domination too... almost forgot that part... oh, and the brain's cries of hunger sound oddly similar to a whale, a gorilla or even everyone's favorite gorilla whale... just wanted to say that.

Just to help make their mission a little harder, Blake's not only pegged the beheading of the cop on Jim and Janet, but he's also got the fuzz under his evil powers (not hard since the police have two settings: "brainwashed" and "excessive force"), resulting in a "shoot to kill" order being put out on our heroic couple's hides. This STILL not being enough of a challenge, Janet has to go and watch an episode of "Independent Thinking" for no apparent reason. It's a doozy of an episode too, all about teenage lesbian prostitutes who disrespect their single mothers and wind up being yelled at and slapped around by drill instructors during the final scenes! No, wait, that was an episode of "Maury Povich" that was on while I had the video stopped. Anyway, Janet watches the television like the helplessly ignorant female stereotype she is, and starts to believe that her beloved Jimbo is really a murderous loon on the lamb... even though she witnessed the events in question in their true, unadulterated, director's cut format. This is followed by a scene that plays as a true head trauma for the viewers, when Jim is chased through the halls of Meadowvale High School by some of the bloodthirsty law enforcement officials, all the while the entire audio is dominated by nothing but an ear-splitting fire alarm. The following chase scene is another cluster-fuck boggle scrambler, as the camera shots jump around from standard full screen to widescreen back to full screen format at a frantic pace that had my pupils doing squat thrusts all over the back of my corneas. Okay, so it wasn't THAT bad, but it was still annoying.

Likely a firm believer in the old adage that the best place to hide is right out in the open, Jim decides to wander the streets of fair Meadowvale, making no attempt to hide himself as he strolls toward Blake's headquarters at the TV station. Things get chaotic when he gets there too, as our vaunted protagonist suffers more hallucinations, must confront his brainwashed mother, outrun a few more of Blake's hired muscle and test the limits of his own "coolness factor", when he puts on a pair of shades for all of 12 seconds to fulfill his undying need to just look even more rebellious... or in a failed attempt to disguise himself. Of course Jim finally comes to the face down with Blake, amassing all of his super cool rebel powers into a mighty haymaker to the devilish doc's face, knocking his block off... literally! Yes, it's astonishing the kind of force a man can muster when he's got adrenaline running through his veins (and his target happens to be an alien lifeform with a neck like a wet washrag). In an ode to Re-Animator, Dr. Hill, uhm, excuse me there, I meant Dr. Blake's severed head get the spotlight momentarily before his own razor-toothed alien brain creation makes his body the latest blue plate special, actually saving Jim and Janet the effort of explaining the whole "I punched off his head" thing to the authorities. Their biggest fear now is the brain, which has now grown to Winnebago proportions and is shuffling it's slimy brain stem straight for them! However, being the genius he is, Jimmy whips out a page from the Anarchist's Cookbook, slaps together a little Sodium Surprise and blows the giant chunk of renegade gray matter into individually wrapped Halloween Fun Size pieces... that's the "Surprise". In case you didn't realize that your brain is made from the same genetic mutations as the bug-eyed fiends of The Horror Of Party Beach (an episode of MST3K no fan will ever forget), well, thanks to educational programming like The Brain, now you do. Fuck PBS kids, tell your parents to support the restoration and preservation of cheap '80s monster cinema!

Okay, allow me to be quick about this, I've got a souffle of human spleens and fetuses in the oven and I don't want it to fall. The whole thing was basically an attack on the television industry, accusing it of turning viewers into zombie followers who sit spend their days waiting like junkies for their next taste of them sweet sweet radiation tubes. Maybe they're right. Who cares. The point here is there's a giant brain eating people and not only does it not get enough screen time, but the whole origin of this nightmare is completely ignored and left in limbo! What the fuck happened to bring all this shit together?! I want to know! Were there intentions of explaining the whole thing in a sequel, or was this one of those "we'll leave all of that up to the viewer's imagination, i.e. we don't feel like going over the required amount of storytelling to cover the origin, so let's just make the music a little louder and throw in an extra chase scene to help distract our audience" scams? I'm going for number two. The direction was pretty basic, keeping it just interesting enough that I don't fall asleep. The paranoia-in-programming storyline also helped prop my eyelids open, though the comedy of our "intelligent rebel hero" Jim was already enough to keep my sharp wit and predatory humor in action. My only real problem again, as stated previously, was the lack of screen time for our bad guys. The villains were far more interesting than our cookie-cutter hero, so the movie really could have benefited from more focus on their side of the story. Okay, for the rest of the review I'm going to focus on the two most important non-brain monster elements of the film...

You can tell Gale was going all out with his inner demons here, letting himself free fall and work the part for every drop of spinal fluid he could squeeze from it. Especially amusing is the little homage to his Dr. Hill role as Dr. Blake's head is liberated from his shoulders and falls into a great *wink*wink* to Re-Animator fans. I would've really enjoyed seeing Gale and bonifide British stage actor-turned-b-movie alumnist David Warner duke it out in a flurry of pure, unadulterated line reading. In fact, when I eventually take Warner back to the Underworld with me on one of my next trips, I think I'll do just that! I'll call it "the Clash of the Davids" and their lines will consist of a combination of classic scenes from the Bard and dirty limericks from his guy I always see drunk at the Bowl-O-Rama who calls himself Balrog The Magnificent. Sure, he may not be able to hold a job (or his booze for that matter), but you wouldn't believe the millions of ways he can rhyme "vulva"! Anyway, the point is that it really sucks David Gale's gone while people like those N*Sync pussies go day after day without even a horrible facial mutilation or irrepairable bout of internal cancer. Fate, thy name is "Bitch".

Beyond Gale however, there was only one really notable thespian in the cast, and that was Mr. George Buza, who played Blake's bushy bearded minion Verna. I point out Buza with the intentions of mocking him, figuring he'd amount to nothing more than this minor role as a flunky, targeting my sarcastic lashings and sardonic wit toward Buza's less-than-quality acting, his "excellent" physical performance and the outright irresistible bristle broom facial hair he sports that were sure to rocket him to the position of the next pop flavor, like temporary tattoo Fruit Roll-Ups, Oreo cookies that turn your milk and unsavory blue tint, or Mung (from the makers of Spam!). However, much to my shock, Mr. Buza actually DID go on to make a small name for himself!... well, he didn't make a "name" for himself per say, but he has been in a few things I've seen. In addition to his bit role as a trucker in the hugely successful Bryan Singer comicbook film X-Men, Buza was also the voice of Dr. Hank "Beast" McCoy on the animated X-Men series for Fox Kids, which was definitely one of Fox's longest running and most enjoyable Saturday morning programs. He's also been in the Canadian handyman comedy, "The Red Green Show" (which my easily amused redneck father watches) and had numerous television appearances in shit like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", Friday The 13th: The Series" and "Forever Knight". Yeah, not a big deal, but it's surprise for someone like me who was intending to dedicate an entire paragraph of mockery and shame on the guy when I thought The Brain would be the only role of his "career".... defeated once more. Speaking of defeat, I think I've said all I need to about this final effort by Bloody Birthday director Ed Hunt... thought I'd toss in a little trivia there at the end, just to kinda make this review seem like there was some worth to it... just check out The Brain, okay jackass?

Sequels: None

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: Bloody Birthday or Invasion Of The Body Snatchers