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 elf-confessed
B-movie actor Bruce Campbell is one of those guys
you either get or you don't. Then again,
considering his short-lived A-list movie career,
you probably don't even know who he is. If you
fall into the last category, you probably don't
know, or care, that
Campbell
has been trying to get "The Man with the
Screaming Brain" made for a few decades now.
In his book "Confessions of a B-movie
Actor",
Campbell
details how he tried to find funding for the
proposed film with buddy (and the film's
co-writer) David Goodman. There were fits and
starts, but the movie never came together. Now,
after slaving away on one crappy Sci Fi Original
Picture after another,
Campbell
has gotten his just dues, and "Screaming
Brain" is finally realized. (The movie,
curiously, doesn't actually have a screaming
brain, more like a talking one, but I digress…)
"The Man with the
Screaming Brain" is, in a nutshell,
Campbell
's tribute to schlock cinema. There's nothing
remotely original or overly great about it, and
although
Campbell
has been around buddy Sam Raimi for a few decades
now, he apparently hasn't developed any of the
cinematic flairs needed to make a movie stand out.
As such, "Screaming Brain" looks every
bit like the low-budget B-movie that its creator
claims it to be -- a film shot entirely in
Bulgaria with what couldn't have been a very high
budget (nothing shot in Bulgaria ever is).
Nevertheless, if you like the Bruce Campbell way
of doing business, you'll get a real kick out of
"Screaming Brain", as I certainly did.
The film opens with wealthy
American industrialist William Cole
(writer/director/producer/caterer Bruce Campbell)
arriving in
Bulgaria
with his blonde wife Jackie (Antoinette Byron).
The two are having marital problems, and their
trip to their hotel is an eventful one, starting
when they climb into the taxi of one Yegor
(Vladimir Kolev), an ex-KGB agent who Jackie has
lusty eyes for. Meanwhile, an enterprising mad
Russian scientist played by Stacy Keach and his
lackey/assistant Pavel (Ted Raimi, younger brother
of Sam) have developed a method to combine two
brains in order to save one.
Or some such. Does it really
matter?
At this point the film
meanders for a bit, and it's not until almost the
40-minute mark (about an hour into the film if you
were watching it with commercials on the Sci Fi
Channel) that Cole meets his demise at the hands
of a crazed gypsy woman played by Tamara Gorski.
As it turns out, Yegor also had a past
relationship with the gypsy woman, resulting in
her shanking him (her method for dispatching of
men) and then shooting him with his own gun. After
Cole and Yegor's body are stolen by Pavel, mad
scientist Keach melds the two dead men's brains
into one, and as the kids say, hilarity ensues.
The film's second half is
really one big Benny Hill skit, and there's a
brief 10 minutes or so where Cole has to learn to
co-habitate with Yegor, whose voice we continue to
hear, although it's
Campbell
's body doing the acting.
Campbell
squeezes this brief interlude for all it's worth,
throwing himself into trash cans, toilets, and
milk, and not surprisingly, they make up the
film's highlights. Alas, the film eventually
returns to its shaky plot by putting Cole on the
revenge trail to get even with that crazy,
guy-killing gypsy chick. And oh yeah, Jackie also
gets killed by the gypsy chick, gets her brain
transferred into a robot with big breasts, and
also goes after the gypsy woman.
If the plot described above
sounds completely random, that's probably because
"The Man with the Screaming Brain" is
basically a 30-minute short film stretched out
into 90 minutes. The film's first half seems to
take forever to get through, but once Cole's head
gets sliced open with a steel pipe, things pick up
immeasurably. Even so, the skits do sometimes run
on for too long, and surprisingly there's a gag
with a pink scooter that didn't make me laugh as
much as the idea of Bruce Campbell, head partially
sliced open, riding around in a pink scooter on a
quest for vengeance against a gypsy broad should
have. Go figure.
It goes without saying that
if you were to approach "The Man with the
Screaming Brain" with the right level of
expectations (re: low), it's a pretty funny little
film that's worth 90 minutes of your time. There
are moments in the movie that had me laughing for
5, maybe 6 minutes non-stop. Oh sure, it doesn't
make a lick of sense, but that's easily forgiven
because, frankly, the film was never supposed to
make sense. And granted, the production values are
abysmal, but then again, this is
Bulgaria
, and I'm sure
Campbell
and company couldn't figure out how to turn that
warehouse into anything other than a lame looking
bar where, predictably, Cole gets into a fight.
What's the point of having a bar in a movie if
there isn't going to be an impromptu fight, after
all.
Most of all, "The Man
with the Screaming Brain" works because Bruce
Campbell knows his way around schlocky films. Just
look at his last batch of movies. In-between every
appearance in a Sam Raimi-directed film,
Campbell
has occupied his time with some truly horrendous
movies, many of them made for the Sci Fi Channel.
What makes Campbell stand out is that he knows
he's in schlocksville, just as Ted Raimi knows
he's not doing Shakespeare when he
"shemps" his way through the film.
"The Man with the Screaming Brain" will
mostly be enjoyed by fans of Bruce Campbell, but
there's no reason non-fans shouldn't get a kick
out of it if they approach it with the right frame
of mind.
Caveat emptor, as the kids
say. |
