Horror High

Interesting coincidence between myself and many of the reviewers who were scared by this movie; we were all 11 or younger when we saw it, and it was always on late night t.v.! There are two reasons for this; irresponsible parents letting us watch t.v. alone that late, and irresponsible t.v. stations showing violence this graphic, even late at night. The movie, shot on dark 16 mm, depicts scenes of fingers graphically sliced off by paper cutters, teenage students savagely beaten by psychotic janitors, a janitor who gets dissolved by acid, graphic shots of a sadistic coach being shredded by the lead character wearing cleats, and much, much more. There is a curious reality to these scenes, lent to it by the matter-of-fact grittiness and low-budget camerawork; they are shot with a definite leaning toward sadism, and it is curious this was allowed on network t.v. even late at night in the mid-seventies. Everyone in this movie, save for a few characters, is sadistic. The lead character suffers a particularly brutal death, as his angelic girlfriend watches, helpless to save him. The end. Not a view of the world you want your ten year-old kid watching. (Though today's ten year-olds are completing their collection of serial-killer trading cards.)

I saw this again years later, and rather than being scared, was simply depressed by the mean-spiritedness of the film and actually annoyed at the picked-on "sympathetic" lead character; had this kid ever heard of changing schools? Of course this is the kind of setting where there is only one high school in a hundred miles.

The acting is unbelievably bad, save for the title actor, and Austin Stoker, who acts as if he's in a better movie than he is as the police detective. One gets the feeling that he had some control over which scenes he appeared in (his character follows up after the sickening scenes of violence, but does not appear in them), and that he must have known at some point that this movie wasn't going to propel his career upwards. It's interesting how many actors (excluding Stoker) in this film never made another one, including the lead. One wonders why? Three out of ten stars.

Like many impressionable adolescents within late-night or Saturday-afternoon viewing range of WOR (Channel 9) or WPIX (Channel 11) in the mid to late seventies, I developed an early affection for this, the perfect adolescent horror clunker. Yes, the papercutter. Yes, the acid vat. Yes, the cleats. And hell yes... Mister Mumps. Whatever Pat Cardi's shortcomings as an actor, he made a convincing tortured high-school Jeckyll & Hyde. I never found it particularly terrifying except perhaps for that hideous ballad in the background as Vernon rides his bike to school, but it's far more compelling in a (relatively) innocently creepy way than the slicker and more cynically formulaic eighties slasher flicks that followed. Like 'Plan 9' and 'Silent Night, Bloody Night' (both big in the 9/11 universe, and endlessly repeated since the broadcast rights must have been cheap... thank Jah I came of age before the infomercial era), it rightly belongs to the Cinema of Obsession, all the more convincingly when you're 16 and watching it for the fifth time at 2:45am.

There's something to be said for a teen revenge flick that could have plausibly been written and directed by a pimply adolescent.

Reading some of the other comments reminded me that this was also one of the films that made me realize that my early tastes in cult film weren't nearly so obscure as I thought. I remember being flabbergasted as a junior in high school circa 1979 to meet a fairly cute, well-adjusted girl from another school who had seen it three or four times

Wow... Reading through these comments is giving me goose bumps! For years, no one I asked had ever seen (or heard of) this nasty little movie, but now I see that I am not alone after all!

My experience of Twisted Brain is nearly identical to many others here: I was 11 years old when my best friend and I saw this movie on Pittsburgh, PA's Chiller Theater. Ever since that night, I have never looked at a paper-cutter or a pair of cleats the same way.

As many of you have said, there is something about this gritty, low-budget shocker that just sticks with you. It's not that this is a good movie, but obviously it had a lasting impression on a whole generation of us. Even now, I can remember the grainy film and cheesetastic music, the vat of acid, the brutal murders. I will never forget that first viewing of this film.

I can't say that I recommend it, exactly. It may be a you-had-to-be-there kind of experience for those of us who saw it back in the day, and I'm sure Twisted Brain may not hold up well after all these years. I'm just really glad to read that so many others had the same experience of it that I did.

What can I say, my friend Jason H. was able to scare me by simply walking pigeon-toed towards me and repeating..."Vernon, VERNON...TWISTED BRAIN!!!!" I saw this on 'Son-of-Chill Theater' when I was about in 1st grade. Christ it's no friggin' wonder why I was scared to go to bed alone, and coincidentally why I was so mean to nerds who did poorly in science! It was a great movie, although I'm afraid to let memory mix with reality by actually seeing it!! The Face Stomping scene was brutal, but it was weird how I still felt sorry for the 'Twisted Geek'.~Lance

While very low-budget, this is still a pretty enjoyable simple horror film. A gawky, geeky high school student gets bullied by his teachers and classmates. He gets revenge.

How he gets revenge is foreshadowed by the fact that the movie begins during an English class in which the teacher has finished showing the first half of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie. Twisted Brain is itself a sort of Jekyll and Hyde remake. The student accidentally handed in a biology report instead of his paper on Stevenson, and the teacher gives him an F on the Stevenson report, and chops his biology paper up with her paper cutter. Those old paper cutters are like machetes! Turns out the student was working on a potion to change the physical strength of living creatures. After his guinea pig kills the janitor's cat, the janitor forces him to drink the potion for some reason, and there's conveniently a barrel of acid in the lab....

Meanwhile, he finds he's less shy in his normal form and starts warming up to a girl he had a crush on. Like Jekyll, the potion also starts trying to change him even when he hasn't drunk it.

I watched it on one of the DVDs in Rhino's Horrible Horrors Vol. 1 box set. It's not horrible, just cheap. Apart from the gore scenes, it almost feels like a Saturday morning TV movie. It's too bad there's not a commentary track.