Horror in the 90s: Brain Dead

Brain Dead (1990) 

Directed by Adam Simon 

Written by Adam Simon, Charles Beaumont 

Starring Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton, George Kennedy, Bud Cort, Patricia Charbonneau 

Release Date January 19th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $1.6 million dollars 

One image. Brain Dead is remembered for one, singular image. The fact that this one image has nothing to do with the movie that contains it, does not matter. There is only one thing that anyone remembers about Brain Dead and it is just one memorable, awful, brutal image. You see it in all of the marketing materials about the movie when it was released. To those who've never seen Brain Dead, this image is the star of the film. It's a very compelling image, one worthy of building a bizarre cult movie marketing campaign around. 

In a college science lab there is an unnamed student toying with a human brain. The student shoves an electrode into the ooey gooey brain situated in a petri dish. The brain is connected to something, a metal apparatus. Upon this apparatus is a complete abomination. Stretched like horrifying silly putty across an empty expanse, connecting to a circular metal apparatus is a human face. This face has eyes, a nose, and a mouth. It seems to have facial muscles somehow, hidden behind a weathered expanse of skin. 

The facial muscles are implied in the film by the way the face twitches in pain when the brain in the pan is electrocuted back to life. Depending on where the student stabs his electrode into this brain in a pan, the face twitches its eyes, wrinkles its nose, or turns the mouth in a pained expression, a wince. From the manner in which the student playfully stabs away at this brain, this is a normal day in the lab. We don't know how long the student and the face have been in this dynamic, but it is not the first time this student has engaged in this twisted game. 

You would be forgiven if you thought that this detached face were that of a main character, that of Bill Pullman, or Bill Paxton, or Bud Cort. It's not. In fact, we have no idea where this face came from or how this face ended up attached to a brain in a pan being painfully stimulated by electrodes. We get only a vague sense of why this is even being done. It's being done to prove that the human brain is capable of being stimulated after death. 

That's part of the crazed, doomed experiments being conducted by Bill Pullman's monstrous, genius brain scientist. Dr. Rex Martin believes he can cure all manner of neurological disorders by using the brains of the dead as guinea pigs. Dr. Martin's particular specialty is paranoia and he is convinced he can cure paranoia via brain surgery. This brings his research in line with the awful, amoral aims of Bill Paxton's corporate shark. Paxton wants Pullman to cure the paranoia of a genius mathematician, Bud Cort, so that said genius will reveal an equation that could be worth billions. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review Carnosaur

Carnosaur (1993) 

Directed by Adam Simon 

Written by Adam Simon 

Starring Raphael Sbarge, Diane Ladd, Jennifer Runyon, Clint Howard 

Release Date May 14th, 1993 

Published May 15th, 1993 

Carnosaur is a bizarre, incomprehensible mess of a movie. Ostensibly created to capitalize on Jurassic Park, Carnosaur was actually released a month prior to the release of the Steven Spielberg all time classic. Legend tells that Executive Producer Roger Corman heard that Steven Spielberg's next movie was a dinosaur film based on a Michael Crichton bestseller. So, ever the huckster carny, Corman scoured the bestseller list for another book with dinosaurs. 

That's when he discovered Carnosaur by John Brosnan and snapped it up. Now, Corman had no intention of actually adapting the book, he just needed it for the optics of making his movie look like Jurassic Park. This extended to the casting of Carnosaur. When it became known that Laura Dern was in the cast of Jurassic Park, Corman wrote a check to get Dern's mother, Diane Ladd in Carnosaur. By this point, he'd chosen a director he was sure could hack up the book and come up with a semblance of a movie. 

Enter writer-director Adam Simon. The man who partnered with Corman's wife, Julie Corman, to make 1990's Brain Dead, was just the man to slap together a dinosaur movie where the only goal was to release it before Jurassic Park came out. Mission accomplished. Simon slapped, cut, and pasted Carnosaur into something similar to an actual movie in a remarkable 18 days of principal photography. Diane Ladd was on hand for 5 of those days. 

Yes, the behind the scenes story is way more interesting than anything on the screen. Carnosaur is what would happen if you dropped random pages of a dinosaur novel into an A.I generator and asked it to turn that book into a horror movie. It has no inflection points, major motivations are missing, and several plot strands arrive and depart seemingly at random. Scenes exist but they often leave you wondering why they exist. 

I'm going to attempt to unpack this plot, if that's at all possible. Carnosaur stars Diane Ladd as Dr. Jane Tiptree, a famed weapons designer now working on designer eggs. What most don't know is that Dr. Tiptree is a mad scientist bent on the destruction of the human race. Dr. Tiptree believes that the Earth belongs to the dinosaur and her goal is to restore the dinosaur in place of man. To do that, she has genetically engineered chickens to give birth to dinosaurs. 

But, that's not all. Dr. Tiptree has also created a virus that infects people and causes them to give birth to dinosaur eggs. Well, women give birth to dinosaur eggs, its left highly unclear what the virus does to men despite the director going out of his way to show men being super-gross and spreading the dino-virus to each other by coughing on each other or on the food they are serving to others. Despite that, we only see women giving birth to dinosaur eggs and then dying. 

Well, except for Dr. Tiptree who, when her time comes, gives birth to a fully formed tiny T-Rex, rathen than just a gross egg. This scene is so sad. Having done her best to preserve her dignity in this movie, when it is clear that Ladd is laying out a blanket for herself to give birth on, I cried out, NO! Not Diane Ladd! Corman, you monster! Ladd had made it to the end of the movie barely acting a moment in this awful film and when she finally sacrifices her dignity to give birth to a dinosaur, it's the only time Carnosaur achieves any kind of horror. It's mortification, an empathetic sadness on our part on behalf of Diane Ladd, but it does elicit a response. 

Diane Ladd is the villain of Carnosaur, I haven't even introduced our 'hero.' Raphael Sbarge stars as Doc, a former doctor turned drunken security guard at a quarry... I think. He has a medical degree on the wall.... I think. Everyone calls him Doc and he seems to know what to do when a woman goes into labor but, it is incredibly unclear what the nature of his character is. We know that his mortal enemy are hippies. Hippy protestors are trying to stop the quarry from digging... something. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review A Haunting in Connecticut

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009) 

Directed by Peter Cornwell 

Written by Adan Simon, Tim Metcalfe

Starring Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Amanda Crew, Elias Koteas 

Release Date March 27th, 2009 

Published March 26th, 2009 

Virginia Madsen is a very talented actress. This assertion on my part is well demonstrated in her Oscar nominated performance in Sideways. However, her name on a marquee inspires the kind of fuzzy, hazy, disconnected state that only Pink Floyd could properly describe. Place her name above the title The Haunting in Connecticut and the combination inspires the kind of yawn that can only be described as jaw breaking.

The Haunting in Connecticut is a movie that commits the cardinal sin of movies. It is not merely bad, it's boring. Not boring merely in the way that one could be doing better things with their time but boring in a way that one is subjected to. As if locked in a room with blank walls and no windows. Gene Siskel put it best 'This movie does not improve upon a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.'

Virginia Madsen is ostensibly the star of The Haunting in Connecticut though one might fairly claim ennui as the film's true marquee element. Madsen plays a country mom to a cancer-addled son, played by Kyle Gallner, who decides to move her family to a suburban home closer to the local hospital. Because the family is not rich she accepts the first home in their price range. This, despite the fact that the home used to be a working funeral home. Poverty is stronger than the darkly ironic, fate tempting idea of moving her dying son into what used to be a funeral parlor.

Dad (Martin Donovan) is forced to stay in the country for work reasons but the rest of the family is coming to the creepy new house. The rest of the family include a toe-headed little brother and a pair of female cousins whose living arrangements are somewhere in the exposition, likely during the onset of my movie-long malaise.

Of course it's not long before the ghosts begin tossing plates and the shrieking musical score begins trying to convince us that all of this is pretty scary. I remain unconvinced. Along the way we greet a few more unhappy clichés including conventional horror movie misdirection where people hear noises that they think are scary but are really cats or birds or relatives.

There is even a brief digression into the child in danger plot as the youngest children are briefly menaced by apparitions. This is thankfully brief but hey if you are going to fly by on cliché you may as well throw them all in there. Clichés at the very least are familiar and even distracting yet somehow even they come off as boring in this film. It's difficult to describe this level of boredom. Imagine Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller mode reading the instruction manual for a ford fiesta. Now take that down a notch and you can imagine something close to what I felt during The Haunting in Connecticut.

This is surprising considering the 'true story' the film is allegedly based on. Al and Carmen Snedeker are a real family who moved into what was a former funeral home in Connecticut back in the mid-80's. After moving in they did indeed report a number of creepy goings on. Their story inspired Ed and Lorraine Warren, the spiritualist con artists who crafted the Amityville Horror legend years earlier, to come and craft an elaborate haunting for the Snedekers.

Not surprisingly, the whole thing became a bestselling book and now this movie. Except that the movie seems to have left out some of the more juicy and entertaining details. Not the ghosts, the bodies allegedly stuffed in the walls, or the alleged séances that may or may not have taken place as a regular bit of funeral home business. That's all in there somewhere, I think, I may have blacked out briefly. 

No. It's the part where Al and Carmen cop to having been raped by apparitions repeatedly over the TWO YEARS they lived in this house. Disturbing on so many levels? Yes, but definitely not boring. This detail was dropped from the movie either in a nod to good taste (Booo) or because writing this detail into the movie would take more effort than the writers were willing to put into it. 

Or, even more likely, it was a commerce over creepiness decision. The film is more bankable as a PG 13 feature not featuring ghostly forced sex. I'm not sure what this says about me but I cannot honestly tell you whether I preferred the boredom or the creeptastic, ungodly alternative left out of the final film. I guess we'll never know. The Haunting in Connecticut is what it is, an utterly mind numbing bore.