Brain Twisters

An experiment in computer-generated mind control goes berserk... and the body count is rising! Who is behind this and what are they trying to accomplish? The film has an interesting lecture with props on lobotomy, awesome early 90s metal and dance music, but that's the only good things I can say about it.

The video game shown is really, really poor for 1991. As another reviewer said, it looks like a Commodore 64. (This same reviewer said the professor is more wooden than Keanu Reeves and that could not be more true.)

I cannot recommend this to you or anyone. By this point, even bad films should at least look good, but this one just does not. I wish it had never been made at all.

I remember visiting my local rental shack and finding this on VHS for cheap. And by cheap, I mean, it was only 50 cents. We have a place here which still specializes in allowing you to rent VHS copies of movies old, new, and DVDs of yesteryear (although the DVD section in Dos Palos is ridiculously tiny - it's a wonder we have any at all... it looks like a donation bin). I didn't want to buy the movie so I opted out of it, and just decided to blow the two Washington's I had to see if this movie was as advertised.

"A movie about killer riddles? A strange looking mentally challenged man sticking his mouth open in the front cover? Golly gee, this looks like it's gonna be a woolybooger!" And before you ask me what a 'woolybooger' is, it's not something that comes out of your nose. It's from the Lone Gunman show of yesteryear; some fat lard tubby says that in a way that sounds so hilarious, it's random, and amusing. I'll be making that into all of my reviews from here on. But now, back to the show.

This movie is more along the lines of, 'What if Disney did a horror movie?' Sadly, you won't be finding any animated foxes slashing mice to death or cats sinking their teeth into elephants while singing a song about it. It's not even animated, and that's a shame, because I would actually like to see an animated horror movie - just because cartoons are mostly for kids, doesn't mean they're limited to one genre. I would know, because I made one.

Not that anyone supported me.

This movie is boring. The computer is not the enemy, just the mini-boss. A mad scientist tries to turn video games into mind-bending machines on it's users and drive the--- ...wait a minute. Don't video games already do that? Doom told me that it's perfectly okay to fight demons with my bare knuckles, and Super Mario told me that slamming my head into blocks will deliver golden doubloons that I can collect each time. If this was going to be a real brain twister in that sense, the real question is, 'Why did a bunch of idiots decide to make a horror film so ridiculously unhorror-like?' It's slow, it's plodding, and by the time you're finished taking a dump - the movie's done.

Also, Eastwest DVD needs to fix my copy. The movie's so bad it skips halfway and ends the movie before anything really picks up.

Then again... maybe that was the evil computer's bidding.

College students are being turned into killers by a large corporation when they watch a video screen. This is the premise of "Brain Twisters". The basic problem with this low budget horror/sci-fi film is that it is just so middle-of-the-road. Too good to be bad and not bad enough to be a guilty pleasure, it is just mediocre. The film is "G" rated for all but the last five minutes when it turns "PG". Such stalwarts of this low budget genre as gross-out violence, naked young bodies and serial sexual acts are completely missing. The killings are either off-camera or back to camera. The only attacks fully on camera are a fake beer bottle to the head, fingernails to the throat, and cooked spaghetti to the face. And when someone is killed, there is virtually no blood! The language is entirely sanitized except for two words near the end ( a f__k and a s__t). There is no nudity. The one bath tub scene has enough bubbles in it to cover Mt. Everest. This film proves once and for all that gratuitous nudity, sex and violence may not help a low budget horror flick...but it won't hurt it either.

Silly me, I thought that "Blood Trails" was the worst film that I'd have the misfortune to watch today. But lo and behold, here comes "Brain Twisters" to again prove me wrong, oh so VERY wrong.

This relatively bloodless tale of an insane scientist (but aren't they all) who's experiments with a video game make his student subjects into mindless murderous psychopaths, has nothing going for it. Insanely bad acting, and horribly disjointed storyline that at times I think was merely jotted haphazardly on paper cocktail napkins. This stinker not only scrapes the bottom of the proverbial barrel, but permanently resides there. It can't get much worse than this.

Not one person in the film has their brain twisted... just the bored viewing audience that twists their brain trying to figure out why in the heck they just watched such a horrible film.

The film seemed OK at first but as I watched it I became extremely bored with the film so I watched the rest of it in fast-forward (double time) and quickly realized I was missing nothing if I had of just turned it off and moved on to the next film in the film pack. There is really nothing to see but people mainly just standing around talking about nothing exciting.

I'm sure there are people out there that found this film entertaining but for me I was bored, bored and more bored with the film. There might be a grand total of 10 minutes of "Brain Twisting" going on that is worth watching - and that is spread out over the course of the film.

1/10