Brain Twisters



Dr. Phillip Rothman is a professor at a local university who is conducting a series of experiments at the behest of Biotronics Inc, a biotech company that also dabbles in video games. And due to how easy the experiments are, he has no shortage of student volunteers. All they have to do is sit in a sensory sphere and watch a series of pixelated, abstract images on a monitor while Rothman monitors their brain waves.

But problems start to arise when several of his volunteers start to take their own lives or the lives of others. Naturally the police become suspicious of this sudden cluster of inexplicable death. But Rothman and Biotronics apparently have friends in high places and eventually manage to get the police to back off. So now it’s up to Detective Frank Turi and Laurie, Rothman’s ever suspicious lab assistant, to get to the bottom of this string of gruesome deaths before these mysterious experiments claim another unnecessary victim.


He donated his head to science, officers, but feel free to take the rest of him if you want.

Brain Twisters is an American low-budget, regional sci-fi/horror film that was made in Pennsylvania in 1991. The only real notable thing about the film is that it features Heat star and Wings regular Farrah Forke in her screen acting debut. But other than that the movie really doesn’t have that much going for it. Even most of the film’s general descriptions you’ll likely find online are rather misleading. The whole reason I started watching it was because it specifically mentioned ‘video games’. But there aren’t any video games until the very final scene. And even then what you’re seeing clearly isn’t a ‘game’. It’s just a clunky outline of a robot haphazardly moving across the screen in an obvious loop. It kinda looks like they just stacked 2-3 computer screensavers on top of one another and called it a day.


TF is this supposed to be?

Nah, even the Atari E.T. game (you know, the one that was so bad that they notoriously secretly buried hundreds of unsold cartridges out in the New Mexico desert) made more sense than whatever the hell was going on with that screen. Instead the only actual games at play here are the ones the corporate big-wigs are playing to try to cover up…whatever the hell they’re trying to accomplish, which as far as I can tell has no discernible purpose.



The easiest way I can describe the story is that it’s sort of like The Lawnmower Man crossed with The Manchurian Candidate. Because here you have all these kids looking at computer simulated images, and for some reason these images are causing them to spontaneously act out, often in very violent manners. Except they couldn’t afford any ‘fancy’ graphics, so the ‘computer’ parts of the movie don’t contain any weird human simulations that make you want to run from the room. In fact, the movie looks pretty good, actually. Especially with its new restoration that it heavily advertised at the beginning of the film. But I digress…


Lot of freakin’ phone calls in this film…

The problem with the plot is that we’re never actually given a reason WHY any of what we see going on is happening. Because you see, in The Manchurian Candidate the brainwashing had a set goal of turning the main character into some sort of sleeper assassin. But here? I have no earthly idea what their end game was supposed to be. Now, presumably, it was going to be used by the government somehow, since the company managed to get the Feds involved. So I assume it’s probably something to do with the Military (because it’s always the Military.) But the ultimate goal is a mystery, since all we ever see their experiments do is make people act sporadically. It’s not like they’re given a specific goal and sent out to attack certain people. One guy mows down a random jogger with his car and kills his girlfriend. And another gal stabs two people at a costume party.


Maybe she didn’t like the playlist?

Even more confusing? The actions aren’t always violent. Sometimes the people involved just stare out into space for a long time and we’re given the impression that they’re hallucinating. Like the time the one lady has a freakout in a car wash when she thinks the water has turned to blood, so she runs out of the car screaming. Like, how are reactions like THAT supposed to be helpful to our armed services?


Deeeeerp….

And how are these people even being triggered to act anyway? I initially thought that it had something to do with sound when one of the earlier characters zoned out after listening to a pinball machine (okay, I lied, there’s one legitimate game in the whole movie!) before he freaked out, tried to choke a random person, and then jumped out a window. But that wasn’t the case with everybody. One person gets mesmerized by water, another by bubbles. And even others get triggered by light, music and even seeing their reflection in the mirror. So there’s absolutely no consistency to their trigger or behavior whatsoever. Which of course begs the question: if just about anything can trigger them to behave in an uncontrolled manner, what exactly is the point of all these “experiments”?



Now, while most of those scenes are odd and may even sound kinda interesting, you shouldn’t get too excited about them, because there’s one more glaring issue with the plot. Namely, the pacing sucks. So you have all these action-y moments where various people are suddenly acting violent or kookie, suggesting to me that the purpose behind the movie was to make a kind of psudo-slasher where the slasher changes every couple scenes (which to their credit actually sounds like a fun idea). But then you have all those scenes interrupted by long, often drawn out moments of people talking. Which just kills any amount of momentum the film keeps trying to build up. And to make matters even better (worse?), is that since the movie ends up explaining precious little of what’s going on in the way of reasoning or motivation, most of those moments end up being not only dull, but obnoxiously pointless as well. So, whoomp whoomp, that sucks.


Hmmm…more corporate phone calls…thrilling.

But other than the story, the movie is actually pretty competently made. Beyond all the abstract pixelated computer graphics, the movie looks surprisingly great. The framing is nice, there was effort to make the colors pop in certain scenes, and the film even gets a little ‘arty’ a few times. So that’s nice. They also seem to have had decent audio equipment to work with, so I didn’t have any trouble hearing every little beep and boop the computers made, let alone anything that was said.






Oh look, a Halloween party! That means I accidentally found an appropriately themed film this month! Go me!



The one ding in that department is that the acting is merely…okay. For the most part everyone is fine (though some of the dialogue is another story). But there are a couple of people who seem to go out of their way to make the room-sized computers feel more lively than they are. That’s not saying that they’re all bad of course, but… Well, let’s just say that it’s not that surprising that Farrah Forke ended up being the only one of the cast that really went on to do anything of note.


Not only does he look derpy, but he was also bad at his job.

So needless to say I was a little disappointed with Brain Twisters. I do like the multi-slasher concept I think they were going for. If they had actually pulled that off I think the movie would have been really fun. But they didn’t, and the story we DID end up with is simply too bogged down by pointless downtime and a complete lack of explanation. Or in some cases coherence. Plus, the movie tried to awkwardly throw in a needless ‘video games make you violent!’ commentary in the last few minutes of the film. And considering the actual plot of the movie, I guess the film is seemingly suggesting that a robot slowly waddling back and forth across a screen is some sort of corporate conspiracy to make the youth violent? Which, considering what they’re trying to peddle as ‘violent’, seems really stupid. Then again, that ‘game’ looked like hot garbage, so if I’d rented it back in the day it might have made me irrationally angry too. Perhaps enough to make me angrily make a trip out to New Mexico myself and dump it in with all its E.T. brethren. But whatever they were going for that whole last scene feels pointless. Much like the film as a whole. So unless you’re curious about regional films, or are absolutely obsessed with Farrah Forke (I’m sure there are a few of you out there), I think this is an easy skip.

Brain Twisters is available on a variety of streaming services.

Brain Twisters is also available on DVD, but looks to be out of print.

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