Man With The Screaming Brain
A convoluted love quadrangle is the impetus for this movie and even though there are four people involved in a quadrangle (quad means four, come on, keep up with me) there’s not enough humanity involved to save this film. I laughed a lot and that wasn’t because the movie was funny.
Set in Bulgaria, Man With the Screaming Brain focuses on William Cole (Bruce Campbell) the wealthiest CEO of any pharmaceutical company in the world. He’s come to Bulgaria to diversify his company through an investment in a mass-transit subway system. Jackie (Antoinette Byron) his wife who accompanies him is emotionally estranged from William. While William is at a meeting, she gets friendly with Yegor (Vladimir Kolev), a local cab driver who promises to show her “everything” she requires. Upon William’s return to the hotel, he meets Tatoya (Tamara Gorski), the chambermaid, and attempts to be as ingratiating as Jackie with less than successful, near fatal results. Degenerating into a thinly veiled revenge story, William Cole in conjunction with a portion of Yegor’s gray matter (transplanted into William through the intervention of a mad scientist named Ivan Ivanovich Ivanof (Stacy Keach)), must track down their mutual killer and set things right.
Bruce Campbell wrote Man With the Screaming Brain and he also directed it. From what I viewed, I’m thinking that wasn’t such a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Bruce Campbell but this film fell well short of the caliber I’m used to from him.
The film starts off fast with really punchy dialogue between William, Jackie and Yegor, where William is the stereotypical American hard-ass and Yegor the street savvy Bulgarian taxi driver, but it quickly loses that momentum becoming disjointed with cuts between William/Yegor to Ivan (the mad scientist) and his assistant Pavel (Ted Raimi). The opening is great. It grabs you and promises great things right from the get go, but it quickly falters and definitely does not deliver. We finally see some interesting developments by the 40 minute mark and even those aren’t really that interesting.
The script, while it does have a few clever back and forth moments is pretty hokey and not worth remembering. It is reminiscent of the type of dialogue found in Evil Dead II, without the memorabilia factor, as are all of the physical antics performed by Bruce. In Man With the Screaming Brain, one side of Bruce’s body is controlled by him, the other is controlled by Yegor, Vladimir’s character. If you enjoyed the possessed hand routine from Evil Dead II then you’ll probably be impressed and then nauseated by it’s repetition in this movie. I believe the “beating a dead horse” analogy was created for exactly this moment. Sometimes, too much, is too much.
Ted Raimi, younger brother of famed director Sam Raimi, should be ashamed of his role in this film. As the mad scientist’s assistant Pavel, he quickly becomes the running sight gag and whipping boy of the film, taking multiple beatings and spewing forth unnatural phrases, in a thick Bulgarian accent, such as “for shizzle my nizzle” and others that will make your scrotum cringe.
The few CG effects we see in the movie are very limited and that’s a positive because they suck. I think we saw better computer effects in the old Captain Power TV series than we did here and that was almost two decades ago!
One thing that really makes films worth viewing is a fairly believable story. When William (Bruce), the wealthiest CEO of any pharmaceutical company in the world shows up in some unknown Bulgarian city without even the most basic security, you can be pretty sure that the story is in trouble. Also, mass transit systems do not make money. They are almost, if always, subsidized by the government so why would a pharmaceutical giant who is making money hand over fist forcing pills down the throats of the elderly be bothering to invest in a mass transit system in Bulgaria? Believability is everything. I don’t care if the antagonist is a protoplasmic blob or a sentient computer program; if you can make me believe that the scenario might actually happen, I’m there. Man With the Screaming Brain skipped that lesson of movie making 101.
In the end, even a PMSing, pissed off, Devo looking robot who is, coincidentally, also on a revenge mission, can’t save this film. There’s low budget and then there’s no budget. Can you guess which column this film fits in? Sorry Bruce, but I’m jumping overboard. As the captain, you should assume responsibility and go down with the ship.
I would not recommend this movie, at all. It is not how I wish to view Bruce Campbell or remember him. I really do like Bruce Campbell, but Man With the Screaming Brain wouldn’t even fit in his B movie portfolio. Avoid it if you can.
For now, that is all. Goodnight.
