Brain Dead - 1990

I watched Brain Dead this afternoon while lying in bed, home sick with some sort of Summer-turns-to-Autumn cold. I wasn't feeling well at work on Friday and it just carried into the weekend and into today. I'm feeling better now, but not 100%. I think the stress of moving last week also threw my body out of whack.

Anyway, this movie kind of left me feeling Brain Dead. It was ridiculous. I knew it would be bad, but I didn't know just how bad. It stars both Bills: Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, who so many people get confused (why? Pullman is boring and not so handsome where as Paxton is funny and interesting and very easy on the eyes - at least in my opinion). Interestingly enough, they have both made almost 70 movies in their career. A fun fact about Bill Pullman is that he went to SUNY Oneonta, the same college my Mom graduated from and I attended for a year in the mid-'90s. Pretty rad.

So Brain Dead is a horribly awful film about Dr Martin (played by Pullman) who does research on the brains of deceased psychotics. Jim Reston (played by Paxton) is a smarmy business man who tries to get Dr Martin to perform surgery on live subjects for a corporation called Eunice. The surgery is to alter the patient's mental attitude in able to successfully unlock the corporate secrets secreted within the patient's brain. What secrets, you ask? I have no idea. Something about some numbers or something. I guess that part isn't that important to the plot.

The movie starts out fine, but once Dr Martin performs the surgery, he starts having his own freak-outs. He can't tell if he's hallucinating, dreaming, or having a true psychotic episode. In one scene, he is to meet his wife and Jim Reston at a bar and he keeps freaking out because he sees a man in a bloodied white suit all the time. His wife becomes disturbed by his behavior and they leave. But on his way home he stops at the wrong house (I think??) and sees Jim and his wife having sex on the kitchen table. Dr Martin kills them with an ice pick....or does he??

The movie just spirals out of control after that. Is Dr Martin dreaming? Is he really experiencing these hallucinations and paranoia? Are these episodes the result of him being hit by a car and having severe head trauma? Is he imagining all of this? Is he dead and all of this is just made up?

Unfortunately, I didn't care to figure it out. It's not that the film was super confusing, it was cheesy and annoying. But I have to say, Bud Cort played a pretty good Halsey, the psychotic patient that Dr Martin did surgery on to get the "corporate secrets" out of. I loved Bud Cort in Harold and Maude and he was pretty good in this film. We also see our hero Bill Paxton's bare ass again in this film, which is OK with me. Pullman was so-so, as he is with most of the films I've seen him in. Paxton plays a great smarmy dude. He does that character well.


I wouldn't rent this film unless you'd like to either laugh yourself silly at how cheesy it is or be bored to death. Don't get this one confused with Braindead, which is something entirely different.

Fun Fact: Martini Ranch contributed a song in the closing credits of this film. It, too, is super cheesy.