L'Ange meurtrier

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

Like many of the other reviewers, I remembered bits and pieces of this film from my adolescent years(ok maybe 11-13). I finally tracked down a copy and the film came back to me as I watched it. The guinea pig killed with broken glass and squealing, the English teacher with the paper cutter, the merciless jocks, and so on rushed to my brain and brought back that late evening in the 70s when I saw this film for the first time. The film is by no means great or even good, yet something in it makes it so memorable to those of us writing here. I am not sure what that quality is - maybe we see ourselves in this protagonist in small pieces. I don't want to get too psychological here, but it must be something about the film. The film is about a young man picked on by all who loves biology and the experiments he has been working on all summer. Everyone at this school..and I mean everyone except a young girl that admires the young man for his intellect...is cruel, sadistic, and totally uncharacteristic of what you would find in teachers and the like. He experiences one shocking mistreatment after another, until forced to drink a serum he has been working on, becomes a Hyde-like character that avenges himself for all the wrongs redressed towards him by all his enemies. The film is very cheaply made...very dark in most places, and it is very gory for its time, which also might explain why it is memorable. I liked the film, defects notwithstanding.

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.

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.

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