BRAIN DAMAGE (1988)
Dir. Frank Henenlotter
Starring: Rick Hearst, Jennifer Lowry
I never felt that I made "horror films." I always felt that I made exploitation films. Exploitation films have an attitude more than anything else -- an attitude that you don't find with mainstream Hollywood productions. They're a little ruder, a little raunchier, they deal with material people don't usually touch on, whether it's sex or drugs or rock and roll.
-Frank Henenlotter
Even the most casual fans of the cult horror genre are no doubt familiar with Frank Henenlotter’s first feature length film, Basket Case, which mixed 42nd street grindhouse and Jon Waters-esque midnight movie sensibilities with the new breed of Horror films coming of age in the late 1970’s. It can be said that mixing sensibilities has become a calling card for Henenlotter. But, if Basket Case (and its subsequent sequels) put Henenlotter on the map, and 1990’s Frankenhooker is the deep cut who’s mention is the mark of a true fan, then it is his sophomore effort, Brain Damage, that falls into that iffy middle ground, lacking the notoriety of its brethren. I had certainly never heard of it before Gilly pitched it to me for the inaugural review for VDR’s foray into the printed word. But, I’m glad he did because the film proves to contain many of the essential elements (and simultaneously, so) that can either break or make a schlock horror film. And by that I mean make it so good it’s good, so bad it’s good, or leave it limply in the purgatory of being just good enough—the death sentence for films in this wheelhouse.
The protagonist of Brain Damage is Brian (which, a member of an internet message board pointed out to me, is a flimsy anagram for “brain,” one of the film’s few nuances I failed to catch.) I wish I could describe Brian, but Henenlotter has never been much for character development or backstory. In Henenlotter’s world everything is loaded to the front. I get the sense he feels the audience can subsist on their own assumptions and thinks of spoon-feeding character studies and pre-story as a matter of unnecessary padding that helps make the viewer feel more comfortable in the world of the film but is far from a necessity. Here is what I can tell you about Brian. He’s probably in his 20’s. He is dating a young girl named Barbara who could best be described as “TV-Pretty” (in a 1980’s sort of way.) He likes the New York proto-synth-punk band, Suicide (we clearly see a poster for the group on his bedroom wall) and he has not been feeling well. Wrapped up in blankets a foot thick, he stays in bed and cancels plans to see a concert with Barbara, who goes instead with his brother/roommate, Mike (played by Gordon MacDonald—who IMDb tells me has children with Holly Hunter and seems to be the only actor in this film who’s career hasn’t either devolved into the wasteland of daytime TV or stalled completely since 1982.)
For the sake of spending more time looking “at the film” rather than “moving through it” I’ll relay the remainder of the plot in brief. Brian discovers the reason he’s not feeling well is because he’s become the host of Elmer, a vastly intelligent parasite who’s described by the film’s title and tagline as a “disembodied brain” yet his worm like shape and several phallic gags imply a different organ altogether (this is verified by Henenlotter in the DVD commentary track.) Elmer secretes a blue fluid directly into Brian’s nervous system which keeps him in rapture with a narcotic like effect that allows Brian to see the vivid light and color permeating the physical world, yet leaves him enslaved to the fluid’s addictive vice grip and thus enslaved to Elmer.
Why? Because Elmer seeks brains, human preferred, and he uses his host as a vessel to go on a murderous feeding spree across New York. Brian—in a tranquil fog of metaphorically opiated bliss—is unaware of what he’s doing only until it’s too late. Once he discovers the Faustian deal he’s made, trading lucidity for the hedonism of Elmer’s “juice” he is too addicted to stop it. To live without Elmer brings on a painful withdrawal. Eventually he decides to give in to the macabre symbiosis, only doing the best he can to make sure his victims are not the ones he loves.
From its opening title card (which, by the way, is one of the most brilliantly designed I’ve seen in some time) all throughout the first act, this film is a startling aesthetic achievment. The special effects look fantastic. And not fantastic in that they are convincing to the viewer, but fantastic in that they hone a look, and achieve it with precision, from beautifully colored rear projection and overlay effects, to the puppetry of Elmer (which in my mind recalls that of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse) and poetically cartoonish prosthetics which, in six years, had come a long way since the rubber monster glove of Basket Case.
As I mentioned earlier, this film is all about mixing sensibilities and with the extended dolly shots of Brian walking down a long-gone era of St. Marks Place in Manhattan’s East Village, the aforementioned Suicide poster, a key plot-point scene at a punk club, and a handful of just-perfectly-not-convincing-enough set pieces of trashcan riddled back alleys and brick courtyards of New York, Henenlotter brings together the low-budget horror we expect with the downtown cinema of the 70’s and 80’s perfected on black and white 16MM by Amos Poe but taken to pop territory by the early work of Tamra Davis, and Susan Seidelman, but also the surreal and under recognized Scorcese offering, After Hours, which it can be said we (or at least I) didn’t expect at all. Henenlotter holds shots, scenes, in long suspended breaths. Towards the end there’s a sex scene that creates its awkwardness not with the graphic gratuity we’ve come to expect from horror films, but with how actually long it goes on in unmitigated normalcy. It’s a moment of Bertolucci in a Stuart Gordon world.
All that being said, Brain Damage does—in fact—fall short of success. For starters the story begins to lag partway through the second act. Once all reveals are cashed in and we understand exactly what Elmer is and what’s happening to Brian there isn’t enough to look forward to from a narrative standpoint. For the second half the suspense is mostly carried by the question of whether or not Elmer will force Brian to kill Barbara and Mike. But this new focus comes too late in the game and is almost forgotten as soon as it’s introduced in favor of more scenes of Elmer’s general mayhem. And on that note I’m also sorry to report that the death scenes (the bread and butter of camp horror) are really nothing to write home about. Aside from a “blowjob/braineating” gag (the movie’s obvious centerpiece and only clever death scene, which infamously caused Henenlotter’s crew to walk off set in disgust) all the death scenes are essentially the same.
Wherein Elmer latches onto and burrows into the forehead of his victims. While these scenes attempt to make up for their lack of creativity with gallons of spraying blood it’s important to note that the unspoken first rule of horror is that your death scenes are supposed to advance in creative conceits as the film progresses. Imagine a Halloween movie in which Mike Meyers simply stabs everyone in the chest. It would get pretty redundant I assure you. Wrap all this up with a rather inconclusively sudden ending and it’s clear that what begins by promising so much only delivers a mere sliver of its potential.
While I praise Henenlotter for incorporating so many references and influences (ones I haven’t even mentioned yet are as varied as 1980’s horrorcore graphic novels and John Huston’s adaptation of The Maltese Falcon) some, while I appreciate the experimental nature of these inclusions, are too silly for me to appreciate in practice. For a perfect example watch this clip from a scene wherein Brian tries to break the chemical shackles that bind him to Elmer’s murderous intentions and towards the end Elmer suddenly channels Chuck Jones’ Michigan J Frog, from Looney Tunes fame.
There’s also the fact that the film’s anti-drug subtext is too obvious, too neatly laid out for an audience that probably could have still gleaned it from the narrative even given a more allegorical presence. The Lost Boys does this perfectly (bet you never realized that beneath a veneer of vampires that movie was all about runaway junkie teens) and if Joel Schumacher can do it, believe me, anyone can.
Then there’s the fact that this film is too similar to Basket Case, and if you compare the two, even though Brain Damage represents the more bold effort of the two, Basket Case is simply more enjoyable. What we have here are two films that center around a young guy with a grotesque monster puppet on a killing spree in Koch era New York: One of them more artfully directed and ambitious in its scope but perhaps aiming beyond its reach; and another, only doing what is easily done, but doing it well. While the former is more honorable, we can all agree that the latter does not disappoint. Yet, if the bottom line question here is do I recommend? Surprisingly the answer is, yes. Despite all its shortcomings I still insist the movie is worth seeing once. To argue otherwise would be reductive, and if there’s one thing this film resists it’s the urge to be reductive.
Now, forgive me if I break the fourth wall here for a Virginia Woolf-esque moment, but I feel it’s necessary to address you, the reader, with an apology. The overall intention for this first review was to bring to the website some semblance of the humor and pejorative-charged tomfoolery that has always been the mark of VDR’s podcasts. Yet, I found myself unable (or would it have been unjust?) to use such a model when talking about (or against?) Brain Damage. The movie is rife with flaws. Yet, there’s nothing to really poke fun at. Anything that even comes close to ridiculous camp is obviously done on purpose, and to laugh at it, is only as subversive as it is to laugh at a standup comic. This might be best described in the director’s own words—whom I’ll quote with the following:
“I hate the ‘Golden Turkey’ mentality... utterly and completely repulsive. It doesn't take a brain to sit around and make fun of a film. I don't appreciate Mystery Science Theater 3000 either; I can make my own jokes. I don't need some smartass to tell me what's funny. I don't think that's real fandom; it's mass marketing.”
While we disagree on the impetus of MST3K (which I feel comes from a place of far more creative homage than that of something like The Razzies) what Henenlotter and I do agree on is that camp horror is (more often than you’d guess) as much a matter of intention as it is necessity. And to poke fun at that or think that you’re liking it for reasons other than those foreseen by the film’s maker, is no more acceptable than to do this for the likes of Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead, or the films of Radley Metzger. Perhaps to laugh at a film like Silent Night Deadly Night rather than with it is the same as if you mistakenly took Curb Your Enthusiasm as an intended dramatic expose of contemporary Jewish life, and that the humor in it is something you yourself have discovered, mined, or constructed rather than taken from it. And perhaps, this is the key to it all. Perhaps the reason we like cult horror is because we’ve convinced ourselves that to laugh at it is a creative act, wherein we the viewers have designed the humor ourselves—in this way we’ve re-written the films and made them ours. Yet giving this credit to ourselves, detracts such credit from the filmmakers, who in the case of Henenlotter, and probably many more, want that credit back, as it was theirs all along while they huffed and puffed for three or four decades and we so smugly sat in our bean-bag chairs, stuffing pop-corn in our mouths and boldly wore our shit-grins as the worst sort of critic: the sort who thinks he or she is the one who’s given the film its agency over the ones whose own blood and sweat marks each frame, twenty four times every second.
