Cérebro Diabólico - A Escola dos Horrores

I am so pleased to see so many people have seen this movie....of course...late night on Elvira or Grimsley. My sister and I used to laugh hysterically at this. I mean with a name like Vernon Potts..you're going to get picked on! We used to say lines from this movie...we knew it word for word!

So now we are in the DVD age and I am looking to replace the really bad and really old VHS copy I made from one of our late night viewings! I need to add this one to my collection.

But on to the film......Everything about it shows the start of teen horror flicks. These guys pioneered the "outcast teenager". This is Carrie, Prom Night......all the horror flicks of the eighties.

I especially like the drawn out interogation of Vernon by the detective. The delays in response, as if they are reading from cue cards, is hysterical.

I really am pleased, like the rest of you, to know that I am not the only one who watched this movie and remembered it all these years.

Jason Atwood does'nt know what he's talking about! Lots of people would agree that this is a very good movie. (about the scenes being too dark,I could see them fine,has'nt he heard of a brightness dial!) I do admit that most of the people who like this film think of what they thought of it when they saw it as kids on late night tv. I see movies on video store shelves all the time that are totally stupid and I can't say that about this one. This was the goriest movie I could find on network tv. A guys face melting off after being dipped in acid,and a guy getting brutally stomped to death with steel baseball cleets are a few things to look for in this movie! The acting is'nt too bad either,you kind of get to feel bad for the main character,its cool to see him get his revenge. (even though he does go a little overboard) I'd like to see this movie make a comeback! If anybody else remembers this movie,write a review,I'd like to see what you think.

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.

Scrawny, but good-natured Vernon(PAT CARDI, in a memorable performance) is a science-minded high school nerd, and an unassuming human target for cruelty who's belittled and abused by nearly everyone he knows(moronic jock schoolmates, choleric teachers, the psycho janitor, etc.). He concocts and ingests a substance which renders him a Jeckyll/Hyde type beast, the more powerful and assertive(and certainly more dangerous)persona emerging sporadically to become the "normal" Vernon's savage avenger. A sharp and suspicious investigator has his eye on Vernon, as does the school beauty queen(because the prettiest girl in school is always in love with the skinny, picked-on science geek. She knows he's gonna be rich some day...)

This bouncy little Crown International Pictures wonder was a perennial staple on late-night creature feature shows during the 70s and 80s, and those of a certain bracket remember it fondly. Folks today should get a kick out of its funky retro panache, and they may be surprised by the potent violence in some scenes(nicely punctuated by jarring heavy-reverb guitar thrums).

An all time great...of sorts. 7/10.

Considering the budget, I have to say this movie really succeeded. It had some great seat-jumper moments far above what I hoped to see in a film of this caliber. The chemistry test scene was utterly delicious. The acting was really very good -- you could tell everyone was serious about making this movie even though they really had no business doing that. The pace was good, the story was sound, the makeups and costumes were good (especially with what had to be a buck-ninety-eight effects bankroll), most of the camera work and stuff was pretty good. And so it actually worked! Unexpected in a movie that dares to take "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" into the recess yard.