Best Horror Movie You Never Saw: Brain Dead (1990)

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Welcome to Arrow in the Head's The Best Horror Movie You Never Saw, which will be dedicated to highlighting horror films that, for one reason or another, don't get as much love as we think they should. We know plenty of you horror hounds out there will have seen many of the movies we pick, but there will be plenty of you who have not. This column is for all of you!

This week we take a look at Adam Simon's insane BRAIN DEAD (WATCH IT HERE – OWN IT HERE) starring the two Bills, Pullman and Paxton!

THE STORY: Successful neurosurgeon Rex Martin is tasked by his shady old pal, a businessman working for the company funding Martin's work, to study a once-brilliant mathematician who has apparently gone insane. Martin's task is to get the man to reveal a formula the company is after, but soon the doctor discovers that he may be the one who has gone insane.

THE HISTORY: One summer in the late 90s, producer Julie Corman (wife of legendary producer-director Roger Corman) had a bunch of interns go through hundreds of scripts that had been laying around her office for a long time. Out of all of them, there was one script they thought she should look at: PARANOIA, written by the late Charles Beaumont (one of the big three writers on The Twilight Zone during the show's original run). Beaumont and Roger Corman had been developing the project in the 60s but obviously it never came to fruition. The script was very out-of-date, but a young writer-director named Adam Simon, who had never directed a feature film before, said he had a way to update the material for modern times. (Simon would later re-team with the Cormans on BODY CHEMISTRY II and CARNOSAUR.)

WHY IT'S GREAT: BRAIN DEAD is quite something; what begins as a seemingly average B-horror movie about a lame surgeon being manipulated by a shadowy corporation goes further and further off the rails as it goes along, as the protagonist – and the viewer – loses any concept of what's real, what's a dream, or if any of it is really happening at all. This is a compliment. BRAIN DEAD is one of the trippier movies of its ilk, and it's often clear how much of an influence The Twilight Zone is on it. I would love a chance to get a look at Beaumont's original script for this, just to see how much of the weirdness came from him and how much Simon added. Either way, the movie is a nightmarish freakout sure to boggle the mind.

There used to be a running joke about the Bills: the layperson couldn't tell Pullman and Paxton apart. Of course, us film geeks never had any problem with that, but still, it's rather fun to see them in the same movie. Paxton was still at the height of his smarminess in the late 80s/early 90s, playing weasels, jerks and bullies of every kind. In BRAIN DEAD, he oozes sleaze as a company man who seeks out his "friend's" help: basically telling the Pullman character to cut open a man's head and extract information from within. And if he can't get the info, just shut the brain down entirely! From second one you know he's no good, and Paxton chews the scenery as a guy who will smile at your face while holding a knife behind his back.

Pullman has the trickier assignment here, playing something of a wet rag at first; Rex Martin is not a very exciting guy, his sense of humor would make a 6-year-old groan, so when we're first introduced to him he seems like he'll be quite the drag hang out with. But after a crucial event in the film, when Rex is almost killed by a car, the character, and Pullman, change rather drastically. In short, Rex begins to lose his mind, and Pullman has a lot of fun going over the top as Rex becomes more and more paranoid about, well, everything. Hey, you'd lose your marbles too if you started to see some of the things Rex sees. A highlight is a scene in a restaurant where Rex makes a complete ass out of himself in front of his wife and boss. That's only the beginning of Rex's downfall.

The third act of the movie is a dizzying series of scenes that escalate in oddness. As Rex begins to question the very nature of reality itself, Simon expertly reflects that as scenes begin to fly by, each weirder than the last. Think of BRAIN DEAD as David Lynch (an obvious comparison, but still an apt one) with a Roger Corman flavor; still a B-movie through and through, yet surreal and frightening. And funny! The movie has a very dark sense of humor, looking at Rex's plight with an air of mishief, as if it's having fun toying with him. Though Rex is never a guy we truly come to love, you can't help but pity the poor bastard as everyone around him is seemingly in on a joke he doesn't get. When the film prepares to fully reveals its cards at the end, you can somewhat predict what the outcome is going to be, but that doesn't stop the film from ending on a bleak, Twilight Zone-ish note that completely works. When it's all over, you might need to splash some cold water on your face and take a good look in the mirror; is that really you looking back at you?

BEST SCENE: I'm going to cheat here and go with the entire third act of the film, because in a way, it's like one prolonged sequence, where one nightmare begins, abruptly ends, and another starts right away.

WHERE TO WATCH IT: BRAIN DEAD is available on Amazon Prime Video and on Blu-ray from Scream Factory

PARTING SHOT: If you enjoy flicks that make you wonder just what in the fuck is going on throughout, then BRAIN DEAD is certainly for you. Spend some time with the Bills as they have fun going bonkers in Adam Simon's hallucinatory hell where nothing is what it seems.