Shaun Watson reviews�

�Part One of the Jimmie Rodgers Collection

Movie poster from the Internet Movie Database The Brain dir: Ed Hunt Tom Bresnahan as Jim Cynthia Preston as Janet David Gale as Dr. Anthony Blakely George Buza as Verna Christine Kossak as Vivian Brett Pearson as Willie Susannah Hoffman as Becky Robert King as Mr. Sweeting Ken McGregor as Mr. Woods and Steve Mousseau as The Weird Man

My buddy Jim, last referenced in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, has gone on to a better place. And by a better place, I mean Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
There he is greeted by cute little monkeys and the giant statue of Jesus every morning. I hope he enjoys the view as much as I enjoy the photos he posts on the Internet. Jim's a real friend to me, so when I let him stay at my place 'til he had to leave for home and onto Brazil, he sent me five tapes before he left the States. I just got them all today and I decided to make up for a predicted content loss, I will post movie reviews about them and link them together as a single collection.
With that, I give you the first entry into the Jimmie Rodgers Collection, a Canadian movie from the 1980s called The Brain.

OK, general line of the movie is that an evil giant brain from outer space wants to dominate our planet via our minds. Seems natural enough, but the brain decides to go about it in a rather strange way. The brain wants to take over the minds of the people in the sleepy Canadian town of Meadowvale through a self-help television show. The TV show, called "Independent Thinking", is hosted by Dr. Anthony Blake(David Gale, The First Power, The Guyver). He is head of operations at Psychological Research Institute(PRI) and tells wives that something is wrong with their husbands. He tells parents that something is wrong with their children. The doctor tells all his viewers into thinking something's wrong with them and tells them to come on down to PRI and we'll fix you up. Dr. Blake makes special note to refer to the facility any of the introverted and rebellious youth of today.
Enter our protagonist, Jim(Tom Bresnahan, Class of Nuke 'Em High, Ski School). He's a troublemaker in school, but he's no dummy. His girl Janet(Cynthia Preston, Prom Night III: The Last Kiss) is as sweet as the sun on a baby's face and they make quite the cute couple. They are typical teenagers of the 80's: Janet's the archetypical 80's movie virgin that serves Jim up blue balls like a racquetball match. They have mutual friends in Willie(Brett Pearson, "The Wall"[TV]) and Becky(Susannah Hoffman, "Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss"[TV]) and have a great time in school, except Jim. His high school experience gets a lot worse when Jim gets caught in a prank involving SODIUM(more on this later) and ends up referred to PRI for testing by Jim's arch-nemeses, Messrs. Sweeting(Robert King, Lust for Frankenstein) and Woods(Ken McGregor, Cocktail, Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil).
Here we meet Dr. Blake's hot assistant Vivian(Chrstine Kossak, Three Men and a Baby), his menacing orderly Verna(George Buza, Knockaround Guys, voice work in Power Stone[VG]) and the Weird Man(Steve Mousseau, Darkman II: The Return of Durant). All three of these people at PRI contribute to the feeling that all is not right at the facility. And so it isn't: Jim freaks out when he learns that not only does the alien brain want to conquer us, he wants to feed on our bodies as well. With an impending nationwide broadcast of "Independent Thinkers" in the works, it's up to our man Jim to stop the impending doom facing all of Meadowvale�AND THE WORLD!!!

The movie is a by-the-numbers horror/scifi film. I went in with low expectations, thinking that there's be nothing to get all worked up over. There won't be enough to scare me, because the special effects won't be up to par. That was my first mistake. My second was getting involved with the story. With my feet firmly planted in the wrong shoes, I began to enjoy every action sequence and violent end presented in The Brain. People getting disemboweled by chainsaws and decapitated by an axe, car chases through the Canadian countryside, people being eaten by a giant alien brain that uses its spinal cord as a whip, and numerous hallucinations make this movie an undervalued gem. Rightfully so; this movie had to compete with films like Bull Durham, Mississippi Burning and Rain Man for any kind of screen presence. So it's not a surprise that this movie didn't show very much on screens in the US, or even Canada.
The quality of the special effects may have been what sent it straight to video, especially when you can see the skirt that the man in the monster suit has to wear to hide his legs to give the evil alien brain the illusion of floating. Nonetheless, I did scream with guilty pleasure when the gross and violent things happened to good(and sometimes bad)people regardless of the SFX throwback of actors crawling into the monster's mouth to simulate their own mastication. It's a fun movie, just�not that good at all. At least the credits pay off in spades.

A far superior movie with an even scarier-looking evil brain. Such is the classic 50's sci-fi movie The Brain From Planet Arous.

• Jim looks like a young Nicholas Cage if Nicholas Cage were attractive at all in his youth.
• The attitude of the current school administrators would seem downright condescending and contradictory to the school disciplinarians of the 80's. Those cats would call you out and say you're NOT an American when you screw up. Sure they'd be out of a job faster than Enron workers, but at least they were straightfoward.
• If you replace Dr. Blake with Dr. Phil, you'd probably get the same results. Given the girth of the evil giant brain, Oprah would fill in that niche quite nicely. Y'know, because she's a genius�and posesses the corpulent shape to mimic the roundness of the brain.
• The 80s in Canada was different from the 80s I remember. It's like they're three years behind in all the American fashion of the era. But then again, fashion was not my concern when watching "You Can't Do That on Television"[TV].
• The freakouts were the best part of the entire movie. Shit was just coming out of nowhere: clawed hands coming through walls, tentacles trying to grab you through the steering column, all that stuff. it was great.
• Note the amount of times SODIUM comes up in the movie, particularly at the Psychological Research Institute(again, more about this later).
• There were incidents in the moie where cars were totaled. It was confusing to watch those scenes because one car flipped over and blew up FIVE times, and the one that went over the cliff did not explode upon impact. Maybe they were using Grand Theft Auto III[VG] rules.

"That's food for thought!"

"I don't want to wait anymore."

"Words are tools for any fool! I WANT ACTION!!!"

"To-night! Sa-tis-fac-tion, alright!"

Unfortunately, such a warning would not be used at the beginning of a video or film recording until the MTV television show "Jackass". In the meantime, people would have to use their own judgements when watching movies like The Basketball Diaries, The Program or "WWE Raw"[TV]. For not following up on the increasing stupidity of America's teens, the country should be ashamed. As a result, that shame translated into a low ReViews score for the 1988 movie, The Brain.