Brainscan

Now approaching thirteen years of age, Brainscan was the last of John Flynn’s movies to see a theatrical release in the UK. It brought to an end a run of fine, hugely enjoyable and downright unpretentious efforts including Rolling Thunder, The Outfit, Best Seller, Lock Up and Out for Justice. Since then he’s continued working albeit on a smaller scale. His regular star of late has been Stephen Baldwin, but this hasn’t prevented him from turning out solid little films. Absence of the Good, in particular, is typical of his no-nonsense approach and worth checking out if it ever comes your way. Indeed, Flynn tends to produce his best work when dealing with the simplest of genres – the action flick and pulp-ish thriller – so much so that had he been born a few decades earlier he would probably have made fine director of Westerns and perhaps even enjoyed a little auteur status. Brainscan, however, finds him on totally alien territory, namely a kids’ picture. Admittedly it comes with a 15 certificate and a helping of gore, but could a Fangoria-endorsing teen horror be chasing any other kind of demographic?

On a basic level Brainscan fits in with such late eighties/early nineties horrors as Pulse, Shocker and Ghost in the Machine. Like them its boogeyman is an electronically generated evil, in this case personified by the “Trickster” and a computer game which turns its players into killers. Taking the same name as the film, it promises “the ultimate experience in interactive terror”, something too good for our troubled teen lead to down. Indeed, soon enough it’s “interface[d] with [his] subconscious” and the neighbourhood is being stalked by a serial killer…

As a setup it’s rather dull and certainly prompts less intrigue than those films which came before it (none of which is especially perfect, though both Pulse and Shocker deliver adequate B-movie thrills). Yet our central character does interest owing his grab bag of near-psychopathic personality traits. We find him voyeuristically taping the girl next door as she undresses; immersing himself in horror movies and video games; deemed a “freak” by his classmates; effectively abandoned by his parents (neither of whom we see, though we do later discover that his mother has died); and also incredibly spoilt – his bedroom is of a size that only Hollywood movies can accommodate and bedecked with a wealth of electrical equipment, no doubt all of it cutting edge back in 1993. All told we have a misfit who could have become something of a fascinating figure, one with enough sociopathic qualities to effectively tease in the did he/didn’t he department as the murders mount up. Except that he’s played by a young Edward Furlong and therefore comes with that disagreeable commercial sheen. Any chance of the film being taken seriously effectively disappeared with is casting – how can someone with such perfect hair expect to generate even a modicum of tension?

Moreover, Flynn is clearly disinterested in the kid. At this point Furlong was still relatively inexperienced (Brainscan being an attempt to consolidate/cash-in on the success of Terminator 2) and it shows every time he’s called upon to demonstrate a single emotion. Likewise Flynn can’t quite bring himself to engage with horror elements: there’s space for satire within the “virtual reality” POV stalkings, yet this is completely ignored; and similarly any attempts to turn the Trickster into the star of his own franchise (surely one of the aims of the films given his flamboyance, witticisms, Michael Bolton hairstyle and fondness for rockabilly) effectively come to nothing. All Flynn really grabs hold off – quite tellingly – is the only part of the film which can be even remotely taken seriously, namely the subplot involving Frank Langella’s detective. Yet this is merely a subplot and by no means enough to maintain a whole feature leaving Brainscan as a film which is likely to interest only those misguided nostalgists hoping to relive their early nineties video rentals.

The Disc

Although we’re finally seeing Brainscan in uncut form for a home audience in the UK (the previously released VHS was downgraded from a theatrical 18 certificate to a 15 and as such saw 58 seconds worth of footage excised - a situation that remained with the earlier UK DVD issued by Pathé), there’s little else to interest the fans. The film comes panned and scanned and not looking in the best of conditions. It’s by all means watchable, but the picture lacks texture and detail; in fact it probably looks no better than a brand new videotape. As for the soundtrack, here we find the original Dolby Stereo faithfully recreated and again it’s proficient enough without ever dazzling. All told, it’s the kind of thing that might just make for an acceptable rental for the intrigued, but by no means is this one to consider purchasing, even at a drastically decreased price. Indeed, the extras content is at an absolute minimum just to further compound the fact.