Man with the Screaming Brain
April. 03,2005 NRThe brains of a Russian taxi driver and a wealthy businessman are brought together in one body by a mad scientist.
Similar titles
Reviews
Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!
Just perfect...
A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
Let me start with, what many others have started with... I'm a huge Bruce Campbell fan. But where I differ from the others I understand and can distinguish the difference between Bruce Campbell and the Evil Dead trilogy.If you are a Campbell and Raimi fan and have any knowledge of their background you will know they love slapstick comedy like The Stooges.To me, this film is near perfection and I'd much rather see films like this than the rinse and repeat Hollywood is churning out like Harry Potter and Superhero films.This film really has a lot of heart and when people say it's bad acting and low budget, yes it's been made on a low budget but no, the acting is no bad, it's just acted in a very particular style.If you enjoy comedy and are a Bruce Campbell fan, this film is for you.
If you've got a taste for the absurd this movie is surely it. The characters are absurdly exaggerated, they are like caricatures of the clichés they represent. The American businessman is THE ugly American businessman, the scientist is weird, his gofer is inapt, the communist is the communist.And yet this movie manages to put absolute sincerity into one of the weirdest love scenes I've ever seen: a sort of Frankenstein's monster declaring his eternal love to a robot. It's got to be true that at the very heart of it this is actually a love story. And in a more daring approach I can even see it as a sort of love-hate story between William and Yegor, after all they have to learn to live with one another if they want to survive. Live, learn and above all communicate.Though the movie definitely is a low budget production and hence suffers a lot from this, it still offers some good cinematography, like the final fight between Tatoya and William/Yegor.
Man with the Screaming Brain certainly isn't a perfect movie, but I'm pretty sure it was never meant to be anything more than a star vehicle for Bruce Campbell, meaning it works as kind of a summary of his entire career: slapstick, sarcasm, cheese, action, and happy endings. Campbell is, as a writer, uneven--there are lots of things in the story that don't make a great deal of sense (why does the robot suddenly have breasts merely because a female brain has been implanted into it?), and some of the scenes feel like retreads of other, better incarnations (the scene in the restaurant, where Yegor and William battle for control of William's body, is straight out of Evil Dead II). There are, however, lots of little touches and non-sequiturs that feel rather brilliant, such as when William is in the height of his panic and screams at a statue, "What are you looking at?!" The movie looks like a Sci-Fi Channel original, probably because it was. The acting is actually pretty good. I particularly enjoyed Tamara Gorski as Tatoya; she was ruthless and cunning, yes, but seemed to have a tragic air about her in certain moments that the story never explored. Ted Raimi handled the standard "bumbling assistant" role admirably enough, and Bruce is funny as the arrogant, sardonic, condescending American jerk. (Now that he's writing his own films, you'd think he'd give himself a role that he hasn't been typecast in already.) Man with the Screaming Brain is a bizarre, nonsensical B-movie that ought to be enjoyable for anybody who can avoid taking a cinematic experience too seriously.
When you're an avid fan of horror and cult cinema, you're inevitably also an avid fan of Bruce Campbell. That almost goes without saying. He's one of the few actors for which the name alone is enough reason to see a film, regardless of how bad or derivative it may be or regardless of how small his part is. Suffice to say many fans, myself included, very much anticipated "Man with the Screaming Brain" because, not only does Bruce play the lead part in this, it also marks his debut as a director! Sadly though, it isn't a very good film and not something I'd immediately recommend to non-Campbell fans. It still definitely has its moments of ingeniousness and originality, but the overall accomplishment is far below any expectations. Maybe it was wrong to expect a typical B-movie homage to cheesy horror cinema, as the emphasis here clearly lies on comedy. But even as a comedy, "Man with the Screaming Brain" is too derivative and too random to ever become a cult favorite. The first half of the film is still very okay, because you wonder where Campbell is going exactly with all the bizarre and eccentric characters he introduced in such an unusual setting, but once the plot has fully unfolded, you'll be shocked at how simplistic and dull it actually is. Bruce stars as a sly and scumbag US businessman, visiting Bulgaria for one of his fraudulent practices, along with his spoiled and terribly bored wife Jackie. They become involved with a local taxi-driver, but they all get killed by a beautiful gypsy woman who's clearly frustrated no man will marry her. No worries, because the brilliant scientist Dr. Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov discovered a method to successfully separate brain-functions from the nerve system and even to transplant two brains into one head. It was Ivanov's biggest wish to show his breakthrough to the American, so he might as well use him as a guinea pig. Once half of the brains of an ex-Russian communistic rebel is forced to co-exist with half the brain of a typically vain and cocky American, the film quickly turns into a series of clichéd situations, predictable gags and exaggerated jokes about cultural differences. The title isn't even accurate, as the brain doesn't scream, but continuously argues with itself. A much better title would have been "The Man with Two Brains", but that already exists in the form of a Steve Martin 80's comedy. The film relies too much on familiar faces (Campbell, as well as Ted Raimi playing the clumsy assistant to Ivanov) and far too little on witty dialogs and good action sequences.