Brain Twisters (1991) User Reviews

I had no idea that a Commodore 64 could be used to create killers.

[Navajas · 3/10 · 21 November 2009]

This is definitely a forgotten piece of cinema from the early 90's if ever there was one. I found Brain Twisters as part of a recent Mill Creek DVD boxed set and, while the twelve-movie sets aren't nearly as daunting as those with fifty, when I purchase a boxed set I watch them all, no matter how painful.

In all actuality, this is not as bad as the other reviews would suggest. That's not to say this is a good movie, either; it just doesn't have anything especially interesting going on with it to fall into that So-Bad-It's-Good category. It does have some blood, but it could have used some more meat and maybe an exposed breast or two.

The basic premise is this: a college professor named Dr. Philip Rothman (Terry Londeree, in one of his only film roles--his acting is even more wooden than Keanu Reeves) is working with a private company to develop a mind-altering software, and uses his own workstudy students as lab subjects. The testing consists of the subjects watching some colorful four-bit graphics that look like they were made on a Commodore 64 or some other piece of hardware that was outdated even by the standards of the early 90's. Very pretty, yes, but in this case the colorful squares also turn the subjects into vicious killers. Sometimes they kill themselves, depending on the needs of the script.

Most of the story revolves around the life of one of Rothman's students, Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke, who actually did go on to get some decent work on television). She's not exactly a "final girl" in any sense, though, just to note--I noticed other reviewers calling this a Slasher film, which it is not by any stretch of the imagination. Laurie is just a lead character, but she is written very thinly; she is, for example, apparently able to resist the mind control aspects of the pretty lights, but that is not very well conveyed through either script nor acting.

Behind the poorly executed plot is a conspiracy involving a video game developer (I think) that is (for some unknown reason) using the pretty light software to put into commercial games with the intention of making kids go crazy and kill people (I guess). There's also this uncomfortable romantic sub-plot with Laurie and a cop (Frank Tun, played by Joe Lombardo, whoever that is). Really, the whole thing is one big mess.

I honestly can't recommend this flick for anyone, but it was moderately amusing, if only because it was so bad.

A slasher film for the "G" rated set.

[maeander · 4/10 · 11 July 2003]

College students are being turned into killers by a large corporation when they watch a video screen. This is the premise of "Brain Twisters". The basic problem with this low budget horror/sci-fi film is that it is just so middle-of-the-road. Too good to be bad and not bad enough to be a guilty pleasure, it is just mediocre. The film is "G" rated for all but the last five minutes when it turns "PG". Such stalwarts of this low budget genre as gross-out violence, naked young bodies and serial sexual acts are completely missing. The killings are either off-camera or back to camera. The only attacks fully on camera are a fake beer bottle to the head, fingernails to the throat, and cooked spaghetti to the face. And when someone is killed, there is virtually no blood! The language is entirely sanitized except for two words near the end ( a f__k and a s__t). There is no nudity. The one bath tub scene has enough bubbles in it to cover Mt. Everest. This film proves once and for all that gratuitous nudity, sex and violence may not help a low budget horror flick...but it won't hurt it either.

You're twistin' my melon man.

[BA_Harrison · 4/10 · 19 May 2013]

College professor Dr. Phillip Rothman (Terry Londeree) uses members of his class as unwitting guinea pigs in an experiment, exposing them to video graphics (that look like the loading screen from a mid-80s computer game) which cause sudden violent outbursts. Cop Frank Turi (Joe Lombardo) investigates these strange occurrences with help from Laurie (Farrah Forke), one of Rothman's students...

Although Brain Twisters meets some of the criteria necessary for an entertaining slice of early 90s cheeze—a silly story, poor acting, terrible fashion, naff computer effects—it seriously neglects the two main staples of the 'genre'—gratuitous nudity and OTT splatter—thus failing to qualify as an essential title for fans of trash cinema.

Forke is certainly fit enough for some gratuitous flashing of bare flesh, as evidenced in the brief swimming pool scene that reveals an impressive form, but she remains hidden under nasty, baggy 90s fashion for the remainder of the duration, and despite the film featuring several violent deaths, the gore is limited to a terrible severed head in a jar and an unconvincing slashed throat.

A hideously lame'n'tame college-set horror slasher wash-out

[Woodyanders · 2/10 · 27 January 2009]

Driven Dr. Philip Rothman (a hopelessly insipid and less than sinister performance by Terry Lenderee) conducts mind control experiments on students which in turn causes them to become crazy and murderous. Sound good? Well, it sure ain't. For starters, writer/director Jerry Sangiuliano relates the meandering story at an excruciatingly sluggish pace and fails to build even a modicum of tension. Worse yet, the characters are all blah cardboard stereotypes: we've got the shameless slut (Donna Bostany, who at least looks hot) who sleeps with all her professors so she can earn passing grades, the no-nonsense police detective (flatly played by Joe Lombardo) who's determined to solve the case no matter what, and even the obligatory weirdo janitor (Charles Lopresto, who at least looks creepy) who's always lurking around every corner. Adding additional abject insult to already appalling injury are Larry Gelb's annoyingly shrill and redundant shivery synthesizer score, a numbing surplus of tedious talk, infrequent kill scenes, no nudity to speak of, extremely mild and largely bloodless violence, tacky 80's video game-style (far from) special effects, and a dissatisfying limp ending. This movie crucially lacks the necessary energy and sense of misguided enthusiasm to qualify as an enjoyably awful piece of schlock. Instead this flick is about as fun and exciting as watching two elderly turtles copulate. An immensely cruddy and unrewarding stiff.

in order to twist, the film has to have a brain in the first place

[movieman_kev · 1/10 · 17 October 2014]

Silly me, I thought that "Blood Trails" was the worst film that I'd have the misfortune to watch today. But lo and behold, here comes "Brain Twisters" to again prove me wrong, oh so VERY wrong.

This relatively bloodless tale of an insane scientist (but aren't they all) who's experiments with a video game make his student subjects into mindless murderous psychopaths, has nothing going for it. Insanely bad acting, and horribly disjointed storyline that at times I think was merely jotted haphazardly on paper cocktail napkins. This stinker not only scrapes the bottom of the proverbial barrel, but permanently resides there. It can't get much worse than this.

A Real Snoozer

[Rainey-Dawn · 1/10 · 10 November 2016]

Not one person in the film has their brain twisted... just the bored viewing audience that twists their brain trying to figure out why in the heck they just watched such a horrible film.

The film seemed OK at first but as I watched it I became extremely bored with the film so I watched the rest of it in fast-forward (double time) and quickly realized I was missing nothing if I had of just turned it off and moved on to the next film in the film pack. There is really nothing to see but people mainly just standing around talking about nothing exciting.

I'm sure there are people out there that found this film entertaining but for me I was bored, bored and more bored with the film. There might be a grand total of 10 minutes of "Brain Twisting" going on that is worth watching - and that is spread out over the course of the film.

1/10

Not one of the great science fiction movies

[Red-Barracuda · 2/10 · 18 July 2013]

A college professor warps the minds of several of his students by exposing them to a video game that can bring about extreme changes in personality. This leads to several of them resorting to murder.

This cheap 90's science fiction thriller is not terribly impressive. The basic idea isn't particularly interesting to begin with but the execution is even worse. There are a series of scenes where we see the victims of the brain twisting game committing homicidal acts but none of them are well delivered and the movie subsequently has very little thrills. Its low budget is pretty obvious throughout but that's not really an excuse for the resultant lameness of the entire film. It's just very difficult to care very much what happens because the basic premise isn't presented or explained very well. We don't really see much of the video game and there isn't really a lot of connection between it and the murder scenes. It's just very poorly put together generally. The best moment, however, was a laugh-out-loud one when the professor unveils a severed head in a jar – it's not only presented in a ridiculously matter-of-fact way but it looks disconcertingly like the head of Beaker from The Muppets.

Bland, What the Heck?

[gavin6942 · 4/10 · 26 October 2010]

An experiment in computer-generated mind control goes berserk... and the body count is rising! Who is behind this and what are they trying to accomplish? The film has an interesting lecture with props on lobotomy, awesome early 90s metal and dance music, but that's the only good things I can say about it.

The video game shown is really, really poor for 1991. As another reviewer said, it looks like a Commodore 64. (This same reviewer said the professor is more wooden than Keanu Reeves and that could not be more true.)

I cannot recommend this to you or anyone. By this point, even bad films should at least look good, but this one just does not. I wish it had never been made at all.

What might have been

[fjaye · 5/10 · 31 May 2012]

I think the other reviewers have been a bit harsh. Yes, there is little blood and no nudity whatsoever. Yes, the execution is pretty tame. Yes, there are plot holes you could drive a truck through.

But the outcome might have been different, had the movie been produced by others. The story centers on experiments in non-surgical neurological rewiring, disguised as a college professor's lab experiments. A chilling concept, when you think about it: the ability to transform just about anyone into a murderous pawn, without drugs and without surgery. (Echoes of The Manchurian Candidate, no?)

Unfortunately, the creators never fully follow through on this, or several other plot threads. We never learn the true purpose behind the experiments (funded by some sort of biotech company). How is the detective's partner drawn into the conspiracy--mind control, or just a hired gun? The feds are brought into the case, and take over the official investigation...but it's mentioned once and then abandoned. The professor clobbers a bouncer with a beer bottle (oh, JEEZ...is he going to become a killbot himself?) but nothing comes of it.

I've seen some real clinkers from Crown International (Malibu High and Cindy & Donna come to mind), but Brain Twisters at least has the germ of a contextually plausible story.

And that's what kills me: it may have been a lack of writing and directing talent, of money, of time...but I think the basic concept of Brain Twisters is solid, and could resonate today. Conceptually, it's not a big jump from mind control via video games, to mind control via Fox News (or MSNBC, depending on your own political persuasion).

Oh, what might have been...

Electric main man has got me by the brain banana

[Bezenby · 5/10 · 16 September 2015]

This film is very much like the superior Strange Behaviour, except there's no Tangerine Dream on the soundtrack and it's more boring. A high cheese factor does help, however. College kids who get involved with some professor's experiments end up killing people and then themselves. The professor's doing this on behalf of some evil corporation who have folks around just in case everything goes wrong, which, this being a horror film, it does.

Just to show how engaging this film this, I've forgotten the names of every single character. There's the main girl who works for the professor, and then there's the professor, who's kind of all over the place acting wise, and then there's this police guy snooping around the professor while trying to put the moves on the girl, while the evil corporation try to quietly clean everything up by shooting people in broad daylight, broadcasting freaky energy waves onto the girl's television, and generally arsing things up.

I know it was released in 1991 but this film has a full on eighties cheese factor on the go. However, there's not much by way of nudity or gore to liven up the cheap proceedings, so if you're intending to watch this one be well warned. The ending is also a bit of a head scratcher (with the worst looking console game ever).

Also – I'm not sure of why the evil corporation where doing what they were doing in the first place.

Enter my mind

[SoapboxQuantez08 · 7/10 · 12 June 2015]

Certain collegians have been losing control in a town, and the reason could be subliminal experiments by one of the professors. At the center of the film is Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke), a college student who befriends a detective. Early in the film, a teen is so beyond help that he panics during the detective's first-murder questioning, and leaps out of a building just for a crime he wasn't guilty of. At one point: a subliminal attempt is made on Laurie, while she and the detective are having dinner, and it seems he's going to get his groove on. Instead, she snaps out of the phase, and he winds up with spaghetti tossed on his shirt. There are pretty bizarre killings, as people are losing control, and people are murdered during a party halfway through. Only Detective Turi can protect Miss Stevens, and stop the pandemonium before it's too late. X-Files episodes involving mind-control (Blood, Wetwired) clearly took a page out of this one.

Where's the garlic?

[mgt1978 · 5/10 · 27 March 2013]

It's not too bad. I was able to watch the whole movie. It wasn't a comedy and didn't have any jokes, but I found myself laughing through some of it. The acting is horrendous. I can't really describe bad acting, but you know it when you see it, and I saw it a lot. The main bad guy was creepy, but laughable creepy. The relationship with the chick from "Wings" and the cop was really weird. There was a lot of food in the movie. It seemed like every scene had someone chomping on something. Two scenes stand out as total cheese.

The first scene is in the nightclub. I guess the creepy bad guy is looking for a new victim. He hangs out in a club, then some 80's synthesizer music starts playing and all the teens start dancing. I think it was the first flash mob. He hits on a chick and she turns him down. There was something eerie throughout this whole scene. It didn't really belong.

The second scene is my favorite and is worth the 40 cents I paid for this movie. The chick from "Wings" gets scared and calls the cop. The cop invites himself over for dinner that he ends up cooking. First he yells at her for having no garlic, then breaks out some garlic in a bag he brought over. They have this "romantic" spaghetti dinner that looks disgusting. Plus, this couple doesn't match up well. The chick is a young beautiful college student and the cop is some goofy looking old guy. He makes some joke about if she is like the virgin olive oil and we wants to check for himself. After dinner he kicks her out of the kitchen and does the dishes himself while the chick watches TV and gets in a trance. She gets a knife to kill him, but she comes out of the trance and starts making out with the cop "Dumb and Dumber" style. They looked like two teenagers who have never made out before. After eating all that garlic I would imagine it wouldn't be too pleasant. The whole relationship is uncomfortable, but funny too.

This movie also had a creepy janitor that never amounted to anything at the end. All in all it wasn't too bad. I'll never watch it again, but it was worth the 40 cents I paid for it.

The title is misleading.

[aaronmocksing1987 · 1/10 · 19 October 2010]

I remember visiting my local rental shack and finding this on VHS for cheap. And by cheap, I mean, it was only 50 cents. We have a place here which still specializes in allowing you to rent VHS copies of movies old, new, and DVDs of yesteryear (although the DVD section in Dos Palos is ridiculously tiny - it's a wonder we have any at all... it looks like a donation bin). I didn't want to buy the movie so I opted out of it, and just decided to blow the two Washington's I had to see if this movie was as advertised.

"A movie about killer riddles? A strange looking mentally challenged man sticking his mouth open in the front cover? Golly gee, this looks like it's gonna be a woolybooger!" And before you ask me what a 'woolybooger' is, it's not something that comes out of your nose. It's from the Lone Gunman show of yesteryear; some fat lard tubby says that in a way that sounds so hilarious, it's random, and amusing. I'll be making that into all of my reviews from here on. But now, back to the show.

This movie is more along the lines of, 'What if Disney did a horror movie?' Sadly, you won't be finding any animated foxes slashing mice to death or cats sinking their teeth into elephants while singing a song about it. It's not even animated, and that's a shame, because I would actually like to see an animated horror movie - just because cartoons are mostly for kids, doesn't mean they're limited to one genre. I would know, because I made one.

Not that anyone supported me.

This movie is boring. The computer is not the enemy, just the mini-boss. A mad scientist tries to turn video games into mind-bending machines on it's users and drive the--- ...wait a minute. Don't video games already do that? Doom told me that it's perfectly okay to fight demons with my bare knuckles, and Super Mario told me that slamming my head into blocks will deliver golden doubloons that I can collect each time. If this was going to be a real brain twister in that sense, the real question is, 'Why did a bunch of idiots decide to make a horror film so ridiculously unhorror-like?' It's slow, it's plodding, and by the time you're finished taking a dump - the movie's done.

Also, Eastwest DVD needs to fix my copy. The movie's so bad it skips halfway and ends the movie before anything really picks up.

Then again... maybe that was the evil computer's bidding.

HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW?

[nogodnomasters · 2/10 · 16 April 2019]

Dr. Philip Rothman (Terry Londeree), a somewhat smug creepy Eric Roberts type, experiments on the minds of his willing students. It appears to be an alpha wave manipulator with a 70's soundtrack. The subjects turn into killers and then commit suicide. There isn't much of a mystery or plot.

The plot was simple and the characters shallow. Looked like a made for TV movie. Film was outdated when it was made.

Parental Guide: No f-bombs, sex, or nudity.

Killer Video Games

[kairingler · 4/10 · 3 June 2014]

This isn't as bad as most people say it is,, sure I rated it a 3 because it deserves it,, but I have at least 50 movies that I think are worse than this one . No major actors in this,, kinda can see why.. a College Professor has a class he teaches and he uses his students as actual lab experiments,, something to do with the brain , and mind control,, it seems that after going thru these mind control experiments his patients feel the need to go out in public and go on a murderous rampage. in the meantime we have one of our female characters falling for our cop friend, typical , but not what happens after she eats his home cooking. I found the movie to be hilarious at times,, I actually sat thru this one , without much pain to be honest.. I wouldn't say it's a classic,, but not too bad by any stretch of the imagination,, decent "b" movie. maybe slightly below average. but definitely watchable.

Not exactly far-fetched; but bad, bad, bad.

[michaelRokeefe · 3/10 · 22 November 2012]

A university research psychologist, Dr. Phillip Rothman(Terry Londeree) convinces a group of college friends in taking part in an experiment to see if changing colors and patterns of a computer game changes behavior. The software company providing the games figures to use the experiment's results in recouping and making money with expectations the games will become popular among colleges students and would eventually control them. But bad thing is... the students in the experiment are already becoming very violent. A pretty tame thriller. Nothing redeeming. The cast includes: Farrah Forke, Donna Bostany, Heather Ann Barclay, Shura McComb and Joe Lombardo.

Brain Eraser

[saint_brett · 1/10 · 24 November 2022]

'Brain Twisters.' What a stellar cast of actors they've assembled for this gem.

Written and directed by Jerry Sangiullano. His poor wife, Dianne, is the producer. Meaning, she had to finance her husband's pet project. All class, guy. (I wonder if she got a return on her investment?)

The budget for this movie is so cheap they wanted to use the song "Born to Be Wild" in the opening scene but had to settle for this inferior version done by a midday TV band.

A country club, polo wearing, unknown is driving his new sports car out in the woods and strikes down what looks like Cameron Diaz.

We're then transported to a 'Pocket Ninjas' virtual reality world as Dr Nobody presses buttons and subjects "Yvonne" to 8-bit Japanese manga eye torture.

What's this called again? 'Brain Twisters.' Well, start brain twisting, or something as nothing's doing to report.

Due to a weight issue, some plump teddy bear girl hangs herself. Why? I haven't the slightest. I guess a poltergeist was responsible?

I don't know what to report other than Dr Nobody looking a little Neil Diamond-ish at certain angles. And he's our main actor. Get a load of his vocals. He's about as excited to be in this movie as I am about watching it.

Listen to him execute his lines with such droll enthusiasm. It's like a slur meets a stutter in slow motion. (I've heard this same monotone in the movie 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles.')

This insecure kid, the one crossed between Justin Timberlake and Ryan Phillippe, is instructed by a pinball machine to commit suicide, so he jumps out a window face first. (It's not like he was six stories up. I doubt one would fatally expire from that distance he jumped from.)

No one's showing any enthusiasm about being in this movie. It's like they get up at 3pm, arrived on set two hours later and look forward to knocking off at 5pm.

This scene with the pickled head in brine shows some promise. Look at the expression on the kid's face in the bottle. (It's like he died from watching the worst movie in history - 'After Last Season.'

Come on everyone - look alive! Show some spirit. Can they be any slower? You did want to be in this movie, didn't you? The head in the bottle looked more excited than anyone else!

If I'm following correctly, I think Dr Nobody is trying to emulate Colonel Cochran's robot program and controlling test subject's thoughts.

A court order battle ensues over the decapitated head like a tennis match. Where they're going with this probably won't have any bearing on the outcome.

Dr Nobody hooks a prostitute up to a Commodore 64 and runs DOS floppy disc programs on her like she's a lab rat and then implants a Silver Shamrock chip in her brain and reprograms her to kill for him. (She's a human version of IG-11.)

The pinball noises cause the microchipped test subject to flip her lid, or the script.

This movie's slower than a ten-speed bike in the slowest gear.

The pinball noise influences the test subject to assassinate two Halloween party goers for no reason.

Dr Nobody hits on a flaming hot bird in a night club - she's a 9 - then glasses a bouncer with about as much gusto as an octogenarian.

"Rats aren't people," Exclaims Dr Nobody. I beg your pardon! Yes, they are, sir!

I think because how stiff everybody is in this movie it leads me to believe they're all by-products of the Silver Shamrock factory and are under order from a higher source.

No one makes an effort in this movie. Get a load of this scene. "I want to apologize for throwing that macaroni at you." Um, it was spaghetti, lady, not macaroni. Oh brother!

My pulse just skipped a beat. By the end of this movie, I'll probably be code blue. This movie is placing me in great jeopardy concerning my health. For some reason I'm a high-risk candidate susceptible to stupidity. Wonder what that is?

This movie's the embodiment of catastrophe. And all that it wants for Christmas is an apocalypse and global meltdown.

My brain's stupid.

A professor at a college, who speaks slower than gear one, covertly works for a computer game company who experiment on human test rats to develop virtual reality games which possesses the player's brain and corrupts them into becoming killing machines if they clock the game and save the princess.

I died on this day in November of 2022 of natural movie causes.

BLLG AKA McGree.

1975-2022.

RIP.

Adequate, maybe

[SanteeFats · 4/10 · 30 April 2014]

About the only redeeming thins about this movie is Farrah Forke, from Wings fame, is in it. The guy who plays the professor is not a very good actor. He does get the smarmy, superior academician snobbish down very well. The professor is doing psycho experiments on some of his students that cause them to go nuts when they see flashing lights and kill innocent bystanders. Terminating the experiments which have been funded by some corporation the professor is in turn terminated a further into the film. There is a detective who is investigating some of the murders/suicides and starts dogging the prof. Then the FBI gets involved, he keeps his investigation going and gets suspended for two weeks. The corporate exec that is masterminding the cover up gets killed by one of the experiments. I don't know this a pretty uneven and poorly done movie. Why was it made? Who knows, someone with more money than taste? Wil;l I watch it again? Oh, Hades no!!!

Not quite as bad as I expected, but that's not saying much.

[soulexpress · 2/10 · 6 September 2017]

Dr. Phillip Rothman (Terry Londeree) is a biophysicist who teaches at an unnamed college. With funding from a software-development company, Dr. Rothman conducts auditory-stimulation experiments on student volunteers. Problem is, once they're back in the outside world and encounter a light pattern similar to the experiments, it turns them into violent serial killers. Not a bad idea for a sci-fi chiller, but BRAIN TWISTERS landed far short of its potential.

The stereotyped characters include the heartless CEO (Robert T. Hughes), the mad scientist (Dr. Rothman), the good girl (Farrah Forke), the shameless floozy (Donna Bostany), the no-nonsense police detective (Joe Lombardo), the creepy custodian (Charles Lopresto), and the big bad government agent (Warren Cox?).

Londeree rarely changes facial expressions, and delivers his lines in a monochromatic drone. When Rothman tells his work-study student, "I'm a little on edge today," he does so because we never would have guessed otherwise. While Londeree stands out as even more wooden than Kevin Costner, the other cast members do no better. But how can they, with a script that doesn't give them characters so much as stick people they have to flesh out themselves?

The custodian is superfluous. He spends all his time alone and does not contribute to the plot in any way. The character must have been tacked on to stretch the film's length to an acceptable 90 minutes for release to theaters.

The camera work is nothing special, though I liked the close-up shots of the bubbles in a female student's bathtub scene moments before she suddenly becomes a double murderer. This petite young woman takes out a pair of football players with her scissors. Sounds plausible, huh?

Finally, the synthesized score is repetitive and irritating. And let's not even talk about the film's original pop songs! Thankfully, BRAIN TWISTERS never produced a soundtrack CD.

I gave the film two stars because at least it wasn't boring.

Entertaining hidden gem

[walk_wild777 · 6/10 · 1 January 2017]

Brain Twisters is regularly featured in the multiple movie sets produced by Mill Creek Entertainment box sets. Those sets, while great, are always a mixed bag. They range from cult classics to the unwatchable.

I expected to find this entertaining for reasons the filmmakers never intended, but I was pulled into the film's plot. While hardly without flaws, the story is interesting and well constructed, you want to discover what's going on. All the actors put in great, fun performances. A real highlight is Terry Londeree, who's look reminds me of a cross between Ben Afflack and Kevin Nealon. While hardly a subtle performance, adds a ton of B-Movie appeal to this film.

Highly recommended for fans of strange, entertaining B-movies.

So many questions

[BandSAboutMovies · 5/10 · 1 November 2020]

Jerry Sangiuliano was born and died in Scranton, PA. He left behind four short films and one full-length movie, which will be the one we discuss today. It's a movie that says, "WARNING! An experiment in mind control is out of control ... and the body count is building!"

Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke, Hitman's Run) is one of several college students who have signed up to improve the world of video games and end up becoming killers when flashes of light begin to reprogram their brains.

Yes, it's Polybius all over again, with the games that kids love being the cause of everything evil in the world, just like they always warned us they would be. They probably shouldn't have sat so close to the TV while they were at it.

Sangiuliano re-released this movie in 2013 as Fractals, which is an amazing piece of carny hucksterism, because as far as I know, video game graphics do not improve over the course of 22 years.

I've never understood movies where evil video game companies try to kill off their main target audience. It's the same reason why I never understood why Judas Priest and Ozzy wanted me to kill myself. Who else was going to buy their records?

X-Treme Era Computer Chiller Thriller

[chicocat2002 · 6/10 · 22 January 2021]

There's quite a few reviews on here telling you how bad this film is. I'd have to disagree on a lot of the criticisms: the direction is professional for the most part - at least on par with any episode of "Hunter", the acting is fine (even 'good' in some cases, particularly Farrah Forke who would later go on to act in major productions), even the overall story idea is fairly intriguing if not entirely original. What went wrong? Well, details. Moments in the script that betray an otherwise reasonably crafted tale. Unintentional comedic moments - mostly from overacting on the part of the less talented supporting cast and their ( or the directors) poor performance choices. Budget and technology also bring this film down - what might have looked passable in 1990 for computer CGI is now assuredly dated and probably 'laughable' to anyone born after the year the film was made. This kind of reminds me of "God Told Me To" except instead of aliens, we have a computer software company manipulating people to do crazy things. It's not as good as "God" by some degree, but any B movie fan should find some redeeming qualities about it. Very little to none in terms of depicted violence or nudity, so that will disappoint the majority.

Not a classic, but enjoyable is more than good enough for me

[happyendingrocks · 6/10 · 9 June 2020]

I put off watching this flick for a long time due to the glut of scathing reviews available online, but finally doing so served as a great reminder not to believe everything on the internet. Brain Twisters is surely a middle of the road offering, but an engaging concept and some creative visual flourishes elevate it slightly ahead of the pack, and the net result justifies its 90-minute investment.

Many of the vilifications I read were centered around the film's dearth of graphic violence or nudity, the expectations for which are likely a product of this outing being most readily accessible as part of various b-movie multipacks put out by companies like Mill Creek. Fair enough-anyone sitting down for Brain Twisters expecting a bounty of grindhouse trappings is bound to be disappointed. However, this is simply not that kind of film. The tone and production values here are more in line with the brand of fare that was being cranked out for original movies on the USA Network in the early '90s, and it's easy to imagine this project was originally slated for a similar arena but received a promotion to direct-to-video status when it turned out better than average. While it's true Brain Twisters rarely dips its toes beyond PG-13 territory, skewering a movie for not infusing exploitation elements into a story that doesn't necessarily call for them and works well enough on its own terms seems a bit short-sighted to me. I have hundreds of films in my library that feature explicit gore and nudity, and I have hundreds more that do not--this just happens to one of the latter, which I don't consider a knock against it.

Although a number of the most unfair criticisms I read blasted the acting, everyone involved actually does a decent job with the material, especially considering the caliber of actors available for a modest production like this. There's even some choice dialogue and interplay between Terry Londeree's surprisingly nuanced evil scientist Rothman and Joe Lombardo's everyman hero cop which reveals that whoever wrote this thing rubbed a few braincells together while doing it. Very few of the cast members graduated to substantial bodies of work, but their characters are fairly well fleshed out and anyone who's invested any time in the world of craptastic cinema showcased in budget DVD collections like the ones you're likely to find Brain Twisters on has definitely seen worse thespianism than this.

The film is dry at times, yet while the computer graphics involved in the titular malevolent experiments are now dated, they're still impressive and disorienting enough to make the lofty concept fly. Subsequent parallels like a well-crafted scene in a drive thru car wash and shimmering soap bubbles in a bathtub serve as novel augmentations to the technological imagery in the tale, and since these callbacks are used as triggers for the film's unsuspecting test subject victims, the central concept ends up unfolding with plausible panache.

Brain Twisters isn't the best hidden gem you'll find in the genre's public domain ether-it probably isn't even the best movie about cabalistic brainwashing computer developers in that field. Nevertheless, any cries of "worst movie ever" are at the very least hyperbolic (you don't need to look any further than the flick that shares the same disc with Brain Twisters in the Mill Creek set I viewed it from to find a movie approximately 80 times dumber), if not the myopic ramblings of disgruntled viewers who clearly haven't watched enough truly awful films to render an informed opinion. I have willingly subjected myself to more unwatchable movies than my sanity will allow me to admit, and this solid thriller that features a nifty score, a passable measure of suspense, and a flawed but interesting idea does not belong anywhere near that category.

Watch it for what it is and enjoy the humble payoff. Or you can grumble about there not being enough slit throats and copulation throughout, but that's a waste of time... if Brain Twisters is in your vicinity, chances are you have between 49 and 199 other movies in the same box set that might better suit your needs.