Rando! Brainscan (1994)

When it comes to scheduling here at the Happy Place, a lot of my life comes down to checking off boxes and meeting various obligations I’ve set for myself. Every week, for example, I publish four Big Whoop blog posts and four bigger, more time and labor-intensive articles, generally Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 and My World of Flops articles. 

I also need to write about the films of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage for the The Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast. And because this is the SECOND year of 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin (confusing, I know!) I also need to write five articles on each month’s theme. 

If a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 or The Travolta/Cage Project article fits a month’s theme that is ideal but it’s also nifty when a month’s theme gives me an excuse to finally watch and write about a movie I have long been morbidly curious about. 

That’s certainly the case with the transcendently stupid 1994 cyber-horror shocker Brainscan. I’ve wanted to watch Brainscan ever since it, and more specifically its gloriously idiotic villain The Trickster, were the subject of a classic episode of We Hate Movies. 

Brainscan may be an exceedingly small movie but it looms large within the mythology of We Hate Movies. It is a special, special movie for a very good reason: it epitomizes the joy of trash, that weird exhilaration that comes with finding something that is terrible in exactly the right way. 

Brainscan lazily typecasts Edward Furlong as Michael Brower, a juvenile delinquent straight out of Tipper Gore’s nightmares. This dead-eyed sociopath loves heavy metal, horror movies, violent video games and taking home videos of the girl next door undressing. 

This is supposed to establish that our anti-hero has a crush on his fetching neighbor. Instead it makes a character with no redeeming facets beyond a love for horror schlock seem like a sex criminal and a predator. 

The only element of high school that interests him in the least is the Horror Club, which is banned when the stuffy Principal realizes that it involves watching and talking about horror movies, something he finds terribly distasteful. 

Apparently the Principal was under the misconception that the Horror Club was focused not on, you know, horror movies, but rather the horrors of war or the horrors of aging and death.

When Michael tells the Principal that he likes horror movies because they provide an escape from his miserable life he asks if the escape is not unlike “lighting up a marijuana cigarette and escaping the real world, hmmm?” or watching a “pornographic sex film, getting an erection and raping someone.” 

Then Michael discovers an ad in Fangoria (which he and his buddy Kyle call “Fango” because who has the time or the energy to pronounce Fangoria’s entire name?) for a CD-Rom game called Brainscan that promises to be the ultimate in terror. 

Instead of simply buying the game Michael calls up its hotline and requests more information about it. It’s been a very long time since I’ve played video games but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. 

I didn’t have to call up Nintendo and say, “So I hear good things about this Super Mario Brothers 2 but it sounds kind of crazy. You’re a plumber but you change sizes when you eat mushrooms and you can fly? I’m intrigued but you’ll need to sell me on it a little if you want my money.” 

Then again Brainscan is one of those kooky video game movies that don’t seem to have any idea how video games work or what they look and feel like. The filmmakers are lucky in that Brainscan is depicted as a CD-Rom game and nobody but nobody fucked with Sega CD, back in the day or now. 

Good lord was that ever a disappointing and underwhelming video game system. Just as filmmakers can let their imaginations run wild imagining PCP freakout because only a tiny percentage of the audience will be familiar enough with PCP to gauge the realism of the portrayal, filmmakers depicting the world of CD-Rom in fiction are fortunate because NOBODY is terribly familiar with Sega CD or games like Make My Video: Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. 

Michael decides to give Brainscan a go, at which point he is introduced to The Trickster (T. Ryder Smith), a cyber-demon who looks like he was kicked out of a goth club for being too old and too ugly. 

The Trickster wants Michael to play Brainscan but when he does people end up dead for real. Michael is understandably traumatized but The Trickster informs him that he needs to keep playing the game which, to be honest, feels nothing like a video game and everything like a forgettable scene in a bad horror movie, and also to kill the witnesses of his murders, like his best friend Kyle and next door neighbor crush Kimberly.

The Trickster is a great character specifically because he is so staggeringly, surreally non-scary. The Trickster loves The Three Stooges, sassily critiques Michael’s taste in music, eats hot dogs and bananas like a horror movie version of Oscar the Grouch and vows that he can withstand any torment with the exception of hillbilly songs. “No country music, please. Every man has his limits.” 

The Trickster has jokes! And a video game unlike any in the history of video games. He is an utter delight. When the Trickster is onscreen Brainscan is tons of campy, kitschy fun but when he’s offscreen Brainscan lacks a pulse.

Brainscan ends by shifting gears dramatically and ripping off the “Who Shot J.R?” plot line on Dallas, Ambrose Bierce’s classic short story “The Incident at Owl Bridge”, Charles Dickens immortal Yuletide morality tale A Christmas Carol and Frank Capra’s beloved tale of sacrifice and everyday heroism It’s a Wonderful Life. 

We come to discover that the film’s low-stakes bullshit was actually no-stakes horse shit when Michael wakes up to discover that Kyle is still alive and that everything was a dream or a fantasy or a game or some such nonsense. 

He discovers that even if you’re a creepy sex criminal pervert outcast freak juvenile delinquent with a dead mom and an absent dad and a messed up leg and the only person who really wants to hang out with you is a weird, effete cyber-villain who tricks you into killing people it really is a wonderful life and that you can change and be a better, less shitty person. 

Suddenly filled with an extremely un-Edward Furlong-like appreciation for life’s wonders, our slouchy anti-hero tells his best friend that he loves him and races to a party to ask the girl he’s been filming naked without her consent if she’ll go on a kissing date with him. 

To her credit, she tells the little creep no, then softens her answer to a “maybe” and they kiss, at which point it becomes achingly apparent that everything that has happened in this R rated horror film by the screenwriter of Seven and director of the Paul Schrader-co-written cult classic Rolling Thunder has served but a single purpose: to give our unlikable asshole of a protagonist the self-esteem to kiss a pretty girl. 

Now positively brimming with confidence and social skills Michael struts into the principal’s office and happily hands the glowering authority figure who earlier, in an act of pure sacrilege, compared his beloved horror movies to marijuana cigarettes and pornographic sex films, a CD-rom containing the game Brainscan.

We end with The Trickster sitting in the Principal’s chair, which legally means that he’s the principal now. Over the course of the film good Tricky Von Trickenstein has acted like a demon, a monster and a killer, sure, but also like a shitty friend and a seriously misguided life coach. 

Why shouldn’t he make the big jump to Principal? Just think of all the vulnerable minds that would give him access to! Alas Brainscan was a critical and commercial bomb and we were subsequently robbed of Brainscan Too: Principal Trickster’s Fantastical School of Tricks.

I would love a movie where Trickster torments an entire school, in no small part because a theoretical sequel like that would focus on what’s great/terrible about Brainscan (the character of Trickster) and removes everything that doesn’t work, which is literally everything else. 

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