Brainscan is a Deliciously Ridiculous CD-Rom-Based Horror Movie That Hit Me Right in the Nostalgia Sweet Spot
Brainscan began life in 1987 as a screenplay by future Seven writer Andrew Kevin Walker about a fright fan terrorized by the evil voice on a video cassette. This sounded uniquely idiotic to me until I remembered that one of the most influential horror films of the past fifty years is The Ring, an international sensation about sinister phone calls and an evil video cassette.
Producer Michael Roy understandably felt that the script was missing something. For starters, it did not really have a villain, just a disembodied voice. Horror movies are often only as strong as their bad guys. What would A Nightmare on Elm Street be without Freddy Krueger or Halloween Ends be without fan favorite slasher Corey?
So Roy, who intriguingly has zero screenwriting credits, as opposed to Walker, WHO WROTE SEVEN, decided to give the film a memorable bad guy in the form of The Trickster.
The cult of Brainscan is consequently largely the cult of The Trickster. As brought unforgettably to life by avant-garde theater actor T. Ryder Smith, the Trickster is the answer to the never-asked questions, “What if Beetlejuice was really into Nu-Metal?” and “What if the guy with the hair from Prodigy was an exquisitely cheesy cyber-villain?” He’s Drop REALLY Dead Fred, Max Headroom with a body count.
When you’re watching a movie, you can often tell which actor the director loves and which actor he hates. Brainscan director John Flynn, a journeyman whose most impressive credit is Rolling Thunder, the Paul Schrader-penned cult movie Quentin Tarantino loved so much he named his distribution company after it, has stated publicly that he disliked his fifteen-year-old star Edward Furlong, who he said he had to slap awake every morning, and loved Smith.
Even without this information, Flynn’s preferences would be apparent in the way the film is directed and edited. The director clearly cannot get enough of Ryder’s zany, unique, and wonderfully bizarre performance but barely tolerates his star's glum, humorless performance.
The other element of the film that makes it a camp classic and not just an exceedingly stupid motion picture is its hilarious over-estimation of what computers were capable of.
Brainscan belongs to that adorable subgenre of Clinton-era cyber-thrillers that assumed that computers were magical and could do anything. If Disclosure is to be believed (and who could possibly doubt a ragingly misogynistic thriller rooted in a deep fear and hatred of sexually assertive women?), virtual reality empowered users to walk down a hallway and pull out folders—in cyber-space!
Brainscan is quite possibly the first and only horror film based on Sega CD technology. I worked at Blockbuster during the brief period when it was a thing. Sega CD radiated promise. It was the revolutionary technology that would allow video games to have cinema-quality visuals and professional sound. It was going to combine the best of video games, movies, and music.
Instead, Sega CD ended up allowing players to re-edit music videos from Kriss Kross, Marky Mark, and the Funky Batch, and, well, that’s about it.
More germane to Brainscan was the provocative 1992 Sega CD release Night Trap. The notorious interactive movie succeeded in attracting the unwanted attention of busybodies, moral scolds, and hysterics with its sex, violence, and all-around degeneracy.
The game was so violent and notorious that, along with the slightly more popular Mortal Kombat, it led to Senate hearings on violence in video games, which led to the creation of the video game rating system we have today.
The Tipper Gores and Joe Lieberman were convinced that games like Night Trap were evil and could lead to impressionable kids down the wrong path. Brainscan imagines a Night Trap-type game that’s not just sinister and lurid but murderous and supernatural. It’s a video game with a body count.
A miscast Furlong stars as Michael, a poor little rich kid who never got over the formative trauma of his mother dying in a car accident. Michael’s dad is a wealthy businessman who leaves him home alone in his big house while he’s off doing business stuff.
Michael is also a computer genius, which in 1994 meant that he was capable of operating a computer. The lonely teenager has a crush on the girl next door. At night, while she undresses, he videotapes her.
In the 1990s, being a criminal peeping tom meant that a character had a healthy libido and interest in the opposite sex rather than being a voyeuristic creep. And, of course, the next-door neighbor enjoys being leered at and even ogles her handsome neighbor in return.
Michael has a teenage boy’s innate obsession with sex, but he’s even more interested in violence. He’s a Fangoria subscriber perpetually on the lookout for the next sick thrill.
So when he learns about a mysterious game called Brainscan from his like-minded buddy Kyle (Jamie Marsh), he’s not just intrigued; he’s obsessed. Brainscan represents a new frontier in gaming that utilizes hypnosis to give each player an individualized gaming experience.
It also allows players to re-edit music videos from Kriss Kross, Mary Mark, and the Funky Bunch, but Brainscan understandably does not dwell on that aspect of the game's non, or at less, less evil aspects.
Variety complained of Brainscan, “It's a rare teen horror pic that can be faulted for excessive restraint, but Brainscan may be too tame for the creature-feature fans and slasher devotees who will be drawn by its ad campaign.”
Brainscan is consequently weirdly devoid of the kills, and gore fright fiends crave. It has a maddening habit of skipping straight to the aftermath of a murder. It chooses to skip the good parts, although, to be fair, the only good parts in Brainscan are the parts involving The Trickster.
At first, the Trickster is just a gauche image on a screen, but he emerges from Michael’s television as the inhuman embodiment of Brainscan, who delivers him some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that Michael is about to experience terror beyond his wildest imagination. The bad news is that he’ll be murdering people in real life as well as the game.
Michael isn’t too keen on the real-life murder thing but he nevertheless feels compelled to do The Trickster’s bidding. The Trickster is a sinister figure of pure evil, but he’s also just kind of an asshole boss who enjoys pushing around his hapless underling for fun.
Brainscan roars to life whenever The Trickster is onscreen doing his shtick. There’s no such thing as “too big” or “too silly” when you’re playing a CD-Rom cyber-villain named The Trickster in a shitty cyber-horror movie.
The Trickster loves violence, hate and the Three Stooges, but he HATES country and western music. And he LOVES to dance. I love The Trickster’s freaky dancing as much as I hate Joker’s weird moves.
And The Trickster loves The Three Stooges. Unfortunately for Michael, he also enjoys tricking him into committing a series of interconnected murders.
These murders attract the attention of Detective Hayden (Frank Langella), a shamus who figures it’s not just a weird coincidence that Michael has a personal connection to the slaughter.
Langella is a legend of the stage and screen in a perversely thankless generic cop role. What is Langella doing here? Collecting a paycheck, of course, and while Brainscan never finds anything remotely interesting for Langella to do his name on a movie poster was a much bigger pull than that of T. Ryder Smith, the actual star of the film.
Brainscan concludes with Michael waking up and realizing that everything was a dream. That means that all the stupid fucking bullshit that we’ve just experienced DIDN’T EVEN HAPPEN.
This kind of ending is a giant “Fuck you” to the audience. I can’t imagine anyone actually being emotionally invested in this nonsense, but if they inexplicably were, this would feel like a cop-out.
I rewatched Brainscan despite having watched and written about it fairly recently because I had such fond memories of its uniquely irresistible shittiness.
Brainscan really held up. It’s so bad it’s a delight that hit me right in the nostalgia sweet spot.
Will the movie be as much fun for youngsters who’ve never even heard of CD-Rom, let alone witnessed its wonders? Probably not, but even if you were not eighteen when Brainscan came out, as I was, the movie is still the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
Be among the first to contribute to the Gofundme over at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here