O Programador De Mentes

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.

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.

This isn't as bad as most people say it is,, sure I rated it a 3 because it deserves it,, but I have at least 50 movies that I think are worse than this one . No major actors in this,, kinda can see why.. a College Professor has a class he teaches and he uses his students as actual lab experiments,, something to do with the brain , and mind control,, it seems that after going thru these mind control experiments his patients feel the need to go out in public and go on a murderous rampage. in the meantime we have one of our female characters falling for our cop friend, typical , but not what happens after she eats his home cooking. I found the movie to be hilarious at times,, I actually sat thru this one , without much pain to be honest.. I wouldn't say it's a classic,, but not too bad by any stretch of the imagination,, decent "b" movie. maybe slightly below average. but definitely watchable.

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.

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