Brain Dead (USA, 1990) 85 min color DIR-SCR: Adam Simon. PROD: Julie Corman. MUSIC: Peter Rotter. DOP: Ronn Schmidt. CAST: Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton, Bud Cort, Nicholas Pryor, Patricia Charbonneau, George Kennedy. (Concorde-New Horizons)
Writer-director Adam Simon re-developed an un-produced screenplay by Charles Beaumont, which was originally written in the 1960s. Had his script been produced in its own time, it quite likely would have attained a cult following- the blur between reality and fantasy would have been ahead of its time. Not to undermine Simon’s achievements, but this film’s limited distribution (from Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons) probably lost its potential audience. Instead, it slowly developed a following on home video.
Bill Pullman, in another role of a fop beset by supernatural sequences, plays Dr. Martin, a neurological scientist who is hired by a corporation (led by evil Bill Paxton) to extract some information buried in the subconscious of Dr. Halsey (Bud Cort, clearly having a ball), a respected scientist who has now gone insane. After the operation, lots of weird phenomena evolve. At first, hallucinations occur in small doses such as imagined conversations or domestic situations, but then things get even stranger. There are dreams within dreams, so that the viewer is never quite certain what is real or imagined. Then it is suggested that Martin is actually a part of Halsey’s brain, and that we are seeing the film from his eyes. But that’s just the start of this mind-bending tale, where time, characters and reality all blur.
The film’s greatest folly is in Simon’s unimaginative visual style, yet that too kind of works for the picture. As in Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, every scene is presented in precisely the same monochromatic, flat look, therefore one can never tell whether what we are seeing is in the “real world” or inside someone’s head. Like Altman’s Three Women, it ends like it begins, so it could run perpetually. In true Corman fashion, this film was shown out of competition at Cannes, because he wouldn’t pay the entry fee. But, no less than the legendary renegade filmmaker Samuel Fuller raved about this movie, yet still it couldn’t find its audience because Concorde wouldn’t exploit its unique appeal. (Adam Simon went on to make Carnosaur for the Corman factory, and the great documentary about Sam Fuller, The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera). Brain Dead is the kind of movie that home video was made for. Discover it.
Originally published in The Roger Corman Scrapbook, 2006.