BRAIN DEAD
No, not Dead Alive, the other Brain Dead
Brain Dead is one of those "rubber reality/is it real or am I insane?" movies that honestly, I'm starting to find pretty tiresome. At the end of half of these movies, everything that's transpired turns out to be a dream anyway. It's hard to invest much attention in a film so likely to turn out this way. And Brain Dead is awfully hard to focus attention on, because everything gets so wacky so fast.
Bill Pullman stars as a brain researcher whose wife just might be fucking his brother, and whose grant has just been pulled. He ends up pitching his new technique for brain adjustment to his brother's company, who wants to open up a nationwide chain of brain-adjustment centers. And when he demonstrates this technique on a valued (but now quite insane) mathematician of theirs who chopped up his family, he starts hallucinating all over the place.
Pullman's kind of having an off day here, never really seeming all there, which may be the point. Bill Paxton plays the brother, like a nonhumorous take on the kind of slick sleazebag he played in True Lies. Patricia Charbonneau (who had a really great love scene with Helen Shaver in Desert Hearts) plays the wife. Meanwhile my rabbit, at age 3 ½, is STILL too stupid to understand that chewing electrical cords leads to electrocution. (chew chew chew ZZZZZZT!!! Chew chew chew ZZZZZZT!!!)
None of this is nearly as fun or amusing as for some reason I'd been led to believe that this movie was. There's an amusing scene where two men fight over a brain, which made me realize that's something I've never seen people fight over in the movies before ("That's my brain!" "No, that's my brain!"). And I suppose the overwhelming weirdness of it all might make it endearing to some, but not me, not today.
I'll take Brazil over this.