The Brain Machine

"The Brain Machine" SHOULD have been an interesting movie. After all, it's about a top secret project where people are told they'd explore mind reading and memory. Of course, there's a darker reason for the experiment...but I was practically comatose from boredom so I really stopped caring after a while. This is because the film is very low energy, has some poor acting and really could have used some serious editing. Instead, it just goes on and on....and you keep waiting and HOPING something happens. Eventually, the subjects all go mad and start doing bad things...but it was frankly too late when the film actually picked up!

The most problematic thing about this film isn't that it's bad...but it's BORING and bad. Some bad films are so bad they're unintentionally funny and fun to watch. As for this one, nothing happens for so long that you have to force yourself to keep watching...which doesn't happen if you watch bad films like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "The Room". So, you'd never want to sit down with your friends and watch "The Brain Machine" to laugh at it....you'd just turn it off and find something else...anything else.

Someone mentioned editing. This is edited badly and what started out as somewhat intriguing became an incomprehensible mess. For starters, let us know what it is you are trying to do with these experiments. Why are these people the best choices for the type of experimenting they are involved in? And, what exactly are they testing? Apparently there is some grand plan that some agency is going to exploit. The acting is pretty bad. Everyone is emoting. Everyone is keeping secrets. They frequently mention that if it weren't for the money, they'd hang it up. There's a deranged minister who spouts scripture. On and on. But, again, the biggest hang up is the lack of laying out a playing field for the actors. There are some really cheesy elements. Those little rooms and those chaise lounges. The awful wallpaper (was it wallpaper?). It was interesting, but didn't seem to go anywhere.

James Best (Rosco From "Dukes of Hazzard") plays an emotionally tortured clergyman who volunteers for a secretive government experiment in this tepid, badly-edited thriller. The other participants in the experiment are: a fat slob, a hillbilly woman, and a wimpy guy played by Gerald McRaney. They seem like normal (if annoying) folks at first, but they all have terrible secrets in their past. The government wants to put these people in something called the "E-Box," which looks like a big cubicle filled with lawn furniture. While inside, their darkest, most embarrassing memories are dredged up for the world to see. Of course, the experiment goes horribly, horribly wrong, and there's a lot of pain, suffering, and death in the last half hour of the movie. The rest is just a rather confusing series of scenes showing big office buildings and people in lab coats. There are about 372 shots of a swimming pool for some reason. If you love establishing shots, THIS IS THE MOVIE FOR YOU. They establish the HELL out of these scenes. The exact point of the experiment remains a mystery to me. Surely, there are cheaper and more efficient ways for the goverment to make people feel bad about themselves. So in summary, "The Brain Machine" -- rent it, won't you?

Ouch, what a painfully BORING Sci-Fi movie! And that's especially saddening because the opening 15 minutes were so action-packed and full of potential! During the intro, we follow a bunch of nervous security officers and hired hit men as they chase a doctor who escaped from a mysterious laboratory with a briefcase full of top-secret files. As he's about to reveal the supposedly horrible & inhuman events that take place in the lab, he's executed. Figures… From then on, the 'action' swifts back and forth between two locations, the aforementioned laboratory and the rural mansion of a corrupt senator (or something), and it quickly becomes clear that the experiments are actually the complete opposite of disturbing. More like dull, pointless and vague. Scientists selected four random persons without living relatives and it's really really really really important that they speak the truth even though a giant machine reads the content of their minds, anyway. They all hide dark secrets from their pasts and people suffer when get revealed; yet I fail to see how these tests could ever result in a humanity-threatening device. Perhaps I missed something, but I doubt it. The interactions between the patients and doctors are even less interesting to follow, as really none of them have personalities. So basically, "The Brain Machine" just handles about a bunch of lame people living in an awfully decorated room. The film also could have been half an hour shorter if it weren't for a THOUSAND stagnant shots of buildings! The relocations from the lab to the villa and vice versa are indicated EVERY SINGLE TIME by a five-second shot of the places. Either the makers really needed the padding or they just assumed that all Sci-Fi viewers are morons unable to notice a change of location by themselves. Staring at a forsaken pool with a mansion in the background for the tenth time in only five minutes becomes quite annoying, I assure you. James Best's performance as the reverend with mental issues is rather decent, but one man definitely can't save this thing from being an absolute waste of time. Avoid!

While I watched The Brain Machine I thought I must be kind of dumb because I had to keep on rewinding it in order to follow what was going on. I thought it was pretty bad that I was having so much bother understanding an exploitation flick. But subsequently, I have read other reviews and discovered that thankfully I was not alone and it seems to be generally felt that this is one confusing sci-fi thriller. It's about a secret government sponsored experiment where four volunteers are put through a series of tests that cause them to relive dark psychological events from their past including murder and war flash-backs. That makes it sound relatively straightforward but boy it sure isn't. It's edited together in such a way that it's difficult following not only what is going on but also who is who. While it's never in the least bit obvious what the point of the experiment actually is in the first place. The Brain Machine itself is sort of vaguely defined, although lawn chairs with sensors do seem to be an important component of it. There is also a room in which the test subjects are located in which the walls shrink in, which is a way of testing the psychological consequences of overpopulation! It's so random and strange. We have good people and bad people but it's not always even obvious what their motivations are, so character actions are also somewhat eccentric to say the least.

But despite being very low budget and shoddily made, there is something consistently interesting about this film nevertheless. It's kind of endearing that a film with so little money and made for an exploitation audience is so ambitious. While it may not achieve its goals exactly, it falls short in an entertaining and intriguing enough manner. Its very incomprehensibility actually probably does it some favours too, in that you can watch this again and discover new aspects. Like a lot of 70's movies it has a paranoid thriller element, where the government are up to no good. The mixture of conspiracy film intrigue with science fiction works pretty well. It stars a couple of notable people with James 'The Dukes of Hazzard' Best a pervy priest and Stuart 'Russ Meyer' Lancaster as the Senator. I got to say I liked this one's clunky charm and while the story-line is messy, it was at least a little bit different. And that counts for quite a lot.