Brain Twisters

This film is very much like the superior Strange Behaviour, except there's no Tangerine Dream on the soundtrack and it's more boring. A high cheese factor does help, however. College kids who get involved with some professor's experiments end up killing people and then themselves. The professor's doing this on behalf of some evil corporation who have folks around just in case everything goes wrong, which, this being a horror film, it does.

Just to show how engaging this film this, I've forgotten the names of every single character. There's the main girl who works for the professor, and then there's the professor, who's kind of all over the place acting wise, and then there's this police guy snooping around the professor while trying to put the moves on the girl, while the evil corporation try to quietly clean everything up by shooting people in broad daylight, broadcasting freaky energy waves onto the girl's television, and generally arsing things up.

I know it was released in 1991 but this film has a full on eighties cheese factor on the go. However, there's not much by way of nudity or gore to liven up the cheap proceedings, so if you're intending to watch this one be well warned. The ending is also a bit of a head scratcher (with the worst looking console game ever).

Also – I'm not sure of why the evil corporation where doing what they were doing in the first place.

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.

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.

This is definitely a forgotten piece of cinema from the early 90's if ever there was one. I found Brain Twisters as part of a recent Mill Creek DVD boxed set and, while the twelve-movie sets aren't nearly as daunting as those with fifty, when I purchase a boxed set I watch them all, no matter how painful.

In all actuality, this is not as bad as the other reviews would suggest. That's not to say this is a good movie, either; it just doesn't have anything especially interesting going on with it to fall into that So-Bad-It's-Good category. It does have some blood, but it could have used some more meat and maybe an exposed breast or two.

The basic premise is this: a college professor named Dr. Philip Rothman (Terry Londeree, in one of his only film roles--his acting is even more wooden than Keanu Reeves) is working with a private company to develop a mind-altering software, and uses his own workstudy students as lab subjects. The testing consists of the subjects watching some colorful four-bit graphics that look like they were made on a Commodore 64 or some other piece of hardware that was outdated even by the standards of the early 90's. Very pretty, yes, but in this case the colorful squares also turn the subjects into vicious killers. Sometimes they kill themselves, depending on the needs of the script.

Most of the story revolves around the life of one of Rothman's students, Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke, who actually did go on to get some decent work on television). She's not exactly a "final girl" in any sense, though, just to note--I noticed other reviewers calling this a Slasher film, which it is not by any stretch of the imagination. Laurie is just a lead character, but she is written very thinly; she is, for example, apparently able to resist the mind control aspects of the pretty lights, but that is not very well conveyed through either script nor acting.

Behind the poorly executed plot is a conspiracy involving a video game developer (I think) that is (for some unknown reason) using the pretty light software to put into commercial games with the intention of making kids go crazy and kill people (I guess). There's also this uncomfortable romantic sub-plot with Laurie and a cop (Frank Tun, played by Joe Lombardo, whoever that is). Really, the whole thing is one big mess.

I honestly can't recommend this flick for anyone, but it was moderately amusing, if only because it was so bad.

A college professor warps the minds of several of his students by exposing them to a video game that can bring about extreme changes in personality. This leads to several of them resorting to murder.

This cheap 90's science fiction thriller is not terribly impressive. The basic idea isn't particularly interesting to begin with but the execution is even worse. There are a series of scenes where we see the victims of the brain twisting game committing homicidal acts but none of them are well delivered and the movie subsequently has very little thrills. Its low budget is pretty obvious throughout but that's not really an excuse for the resultant lameness of the entire film. It's just very difficult to care very much what happens because the basic premise isn't presented or explained very well. We don't really see much of the video game and there isn't really a lot of connection between it and the murder scenes. It's just very poorly put together generally. The best moment, however, was a laugh-out-loud one when the professor unveils a severed head in a jar – it's not only presented in a ridiculously matter-of-fact way but it looks disconcertingly like the head of Beaker from The Muppets.