Man with the Screaming Brain

Man with the Screaming Brain is Bruce Campbell's directorial debut. It is a 50's sci-fi-themed oddity, filmed in Bulgaria, in which a businessman gets mixed up with a strange ex-KGB taxi driver who eventually kills him. This of course makes him a perfect test subject for a local mad-scientist who's wants to transplant parts of his brain into a test subject.

Everything about this film seemed to somehow be simultaneously better and worse than I expected. The characters are ridiculous, but I didn't find any of the actors performances unbearable. The movie seems to try to be a clever mockery of 50's sci-fi, ends up mostly failing at that and doing bad slapstick instead, but then somehow works on a different level as a sort of weird meta-mockery of itself.

Be sure to watch for the Vespa explosion. It's the finest usage of special effects in a vehicle crash, ever.