Showing posts with label Bruce Campbell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bruce Campbell. Show all posts

Friday, November 28, 2008

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.