Salem's Lot (1979)

Salem’s Lot (1979)

Dir. by Tobe Hooper

Written by Paul Monash

Starring David Soul, James Mason, Bonnie Bedelia, Lance Kerwin

            Would you believe I never saw SALEM’S LOT before now? That’s a pretty big one to miss for so long. I saw BRAIN TWISTERS and THE BLACK ROOM and CORRUPT LIEUTENANT and THE TAINT before SALEM’S LOT! I knew it was considered something of a minor classic, but I never really knew much about it. I never even realized, I don’t think, that the floating vampiric Bart Simpson in Treehouse of Horror IV was a reference! For once, I’m left feeling sort of like my brother, who is not naturally inclined to be a cinephile, but does occasionally watch movies with me, leading to a bizarre situation where he’s seen some seriously weird shit (STREET TRASH, RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS) without seeing some basic cultural touchstones (THE GODFATHER and GONE WITH THE WIND). Finally, I get to be the guy in the room who doesn’t get the joke! It’s kind of refreshing, actually. Maybe I should try this more often.

            (I never saw the original Tim Curry IT, either. What kind of fucking monster am I Jesus Christ.)

            Anyway, people always talked this one up, and it definitely has a lot going for it. Its pedigree alone -- a Tobe Hooper adaptation of a Stephen King novel-- would be reason enough to watch. Even if neither of those men exactly has a, uh, spotless track record. If we’re being perfectly honest, in fact, they both have a lot more misses than hits on their respective resumes, but considering that their hits, when they come, sometimes rank among the horror genre’s greatest achievements, they’ve earned quite a bit of leeway. One classic TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE forgives a hell of a lot of SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTIONs. And Hooper has two. Besides, sometimes they’re even great when they suck! Stephen King directed the only movie in history with a full score by AC/DC. Not soundtrack. Film score. If I had done that, I’d put that shit on my fucking tombstone and then blow my head off, determined to go out at the top of my game. Instead of doing that, King spent the next decade collaborating with Michael Jackson (GHOSTS) and writing my personal favorite of all his novels (Bag of Bones). Of course, the Mick Garris adaptation of that one is crap, so yeah, there are definitely some unambiguous lows to go along with the giddy highs.

            One thing I don’t associate with either of those two horror grandmasters, however, is quiet competence, and that turns out to be mostly (but not entirely) what SALEM’S LOT provides. It’s a leisurely (183 minutes across two “episodes!”) small-town ensemble TV movie which patiently takes its time establishing the characters and the town before even more patiently working little threads of dread into the scenario, which finally bloom into some ferocious horror only very late in the proceedings. Which is to say, it has a lot more Stephen King --with his affection for quirky small town characters and the colorful minutiae of their lives-- than Hooper, whose specialty is usually grueling, way-over-the-top horror setpieces. But what makes SALEM’S LOT kind of special is how well the two styles eventually mesh; Hooper asserts himself only rarely, but when he does, it packs a visceral punch that few King adaptations are able to muster, and it results in some sequences which are rightly considered iconic enough for a Simpsons parody.

            Before we get to that, though, there’s a lot of stage-setting to do. We begin with a flash-forward showing Ben Mears (David Soul, either Starsky or Hutch, there’s no way to be sure, but he was definitely in PENTATHLON with Dolph Lundgren) and young Mark Petrie (Lance Kerwin, TV movie The Boy Who Drank Too Much, ENEMY MINE, and The Loneliest Runner*) apparently on the run somewhere in Mexico, which lets us know right off the bat that things aren’t going to turn out too well for our heroes here. From there we flash back to Mears’ arrival at the quaint New England town of Jerusalem’s Lot (‘Salem’s Lot to its friends), which we gradually learn was his home as a youth, from which he has been long absent. He’s returned to pursue a rewarding career in being a Stephen King surrogate character, although I notice he doesn’t seem to spend a lot of time actually writing, or at least he seems to spend a lot more time obsessing about the local mystery house of evil known as the Marsten House. That house, an austere Gothic Victorian affair shamelessly jacking the Norman Bates style, has recently been purchased by a pair of wealthy eccentric out-of-towners who run an antique shop together, the well-dressed Richard Straker (James Mason, NORTH BY NORTHWEST) and the curiously unseen Kurt Barlow (Reggie Nalder, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH [1956], THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE).

            Now I know what you’re thinking, but amazingly this does not turn out to be the story of a flamboyant gay couple whose wacky attempts to stay closeted in conservative small town America eventually warm the heart of even cranky old father Callahan (James Gallery, SOUR GRAPES) and teach us a valuable lesson about tolerance.** Instead, and I know this will surprise you so please take a moment to compose yourself first, they’re vampires, trying to convert the subplot-prone townsfolk into a growing army of the undead. You’d think this would be quickly evident to everyone, but the town folks are very, very busy living their complicated small-town lives as if they’re not in a vampire movie. Which turns out not to be such a good survival strategy in the long run.

            In the short run, though, it means we’re treated to a movie which starts out as a friendly small-town soap opera but gradually darkens into something else. Unfortunately, Hooper’s strength as a filmmaker doesn’t really run towards folksy charm, so while the leisurely plotline about Bonnie’s (Julie Cobb, Brave New World [1980]) affair with dorky real estate agent Larry (Fred Willard, everything) and the increasing suspicions of her sullen husband Cully (George Dzundza, THE DEER HUNTER***), isn’t exactly unwatchable, there’s a distinct and unmistakable sense that it’s almost certainly unnecessary. Hooper’s being a pal and trying to accurately capture the novel’s meandering side plots (or at least trying to stretch the material into a two-part mini-series with the complicity of screenwriter Paul Monash [THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE]) but there’s really no sense that he has the same affection for these characters that King does, and consequently a good chunk of the film, especially near the start, seems larded up with a lot of extraneous characters and nonsense which is not utterly without charm, but also isn’t nearly charming enough to be included for its own sake.

            Even with that handicap, though, Hooper is not entirely stranded outside his comfort zone: the conclusion of the affair subplot I just mentioned, which finds a drunken Cully maliciously threatening the two lovebirds with a shotgun, is very possibly the most intense sequence in the entire movie, a prickly, button-pushing confrontation just bristling with coiled sexual violence which seems entirely likely to whiplash the viewer from amiable soap opera to grueling crucible of brutality. Hooper may not have a deft hand with (nor a lot of apparent interest in) this plotline’s possibilities as a cheerful sex romp, but he definitely knows how to get some mileage out of a drunk, abusive redneck with a shotgun torturing some airheaded city folk who have bitten off more than they could chew. I’ve never read the novel, but I’d wager King’s version of this scene has more interest in resolving the character arcs than transmogrifying everyone to a state of animalistic savagery, but of course that’s where Hooper would take it, and ultimately to good effect. It has fuck all to do with our main characters or with vampires of any kind, and it could easily be excised with virtually no alternation of any kind to the rest of the plot (in fact, it looks like the 2004 remake did exactly that), but there’s no denying its bleak, misanthropic intensity. And keep in mind -- this is a PG-rated TV movie, so there’s no gore, not even any bad language, and yet this scene still comes off as absolutely harrowing.

Only Hooper was gonna get that expression in this film.

Not all its soap opera aspirations pay off as potently as that one (the inclusion of an old drunk named “Weasel” appears to be exclusively an opportunity to reteam THE KILLING’s Elisha Cook Jr and Marie Windsor for one scene, not that there’s anything wrong with that impulse), but it doesn’t matter in the end, because the vampire stuff, once it starts in earnest, is absolutely top-shelf, effortlessly dropping a string of vividly intense, nightmarish images which still have the power to stop you cold, more than 30 years later. First and foremost here is certainly the design of long-unseen head vampire Kurt Barlow, who is revealed roughly halfway through to eschew the standard smoldering Eurotrash mold which has defined vampire cinema since Bela Lugosi, and instead take after something older: the iconic bald-headed rat-toothed Max Schreck look from Murnau’s 1922 NOSFERATU. It’s stunning to think that this image had been entirely absent from vampire fiction since 1922, (with the sole exception of Herzog’s Klaus Kinski-starring 1978 remake) but Hooper makes up for it with a vengeance, utilizing the grainy, vivid color film to add blazing yellow eyes and a skin cast which tilts towards an alien blue.

 The makeup turns actor Reggie Nalder’s already pinched, cadaverous face into something utterly inhuman and nightmarish, an unknowable, malignant predator. This is apparently a significant alteration from King’s novel, which casts Barlow as a more typical, speechifying European vampire, and it plays mightily to Hooper’s strength for aggressive, primal horror setpieces. The sequence where Barlow (spoiler) suddenly crashes through a window (in the form of a bat, I think, though my initial visual read was a wadded up bundle of cape, which is somehow even more squirmy and nightmarish) and haltingly grows to his full human size, is such a viscerally shocking violation of the earthy domestic kitchen scene which proceeds it that it’s genuinely unnerving, even though the first thing he does is comically bonk two adults’ heads together. A movie willing to visit that kind of perverse, random violence on a harmless, boring family is one which ought not be fucked with.

I actually decided at the last minute not to include a picture of Barlow in this review, on the off-chance that somehow you've never seen it and could still be surprised. But google "Kurt Barlow" or "Salem's Lot Vampire" or whatever and you'll find plenty of nightmare material. Also, I desperately wanted to include the Spanish-language poster because it's so goddam awesome, but it also has his picture on it so I didn't. Check it out though.

But as memorable a villain as Barlow is, the single most disquieting scene in the film actually comes before his reveal. It’s the image of one of the first vampirized citizens of Salem’s Lot, a young kid named Ralphie Glick, (Ronnie Scribner, Kenny Rogers as the Gambler) hovering outside his older brother’s window, beckoning him to his doom. Hooper pulls out all the stops on that one, raising the corpse-painted tyke out of a surreal foggy dreamscape, like a bad memory rising unbidden from a vague subconscious pit of anxiety, and then shooting the whole thing in reverse for added uncanny effect. If it lacks the primal kick of Barlow’s kitchen attack, it makes up for it with an exceedingly unsettling vibe of perverse wrongness. Even the little kid’s goofy shit-eating grin somehow adds to the effect; it’s so completely inappropriate for the situation and so fixedly plastered on that it neatly bridges the gap between “child actor not sure what to do in a bizarre artificial situation” and “profoundly disturbing unnatural expression that no human would ever intentionally produce.” The whole effect is brought home by the sound department, who produce hands-down the greatest and most nerve-wracking foley effect of “fingernails scraping glass” ever to grace the silver screen.

I just discussed three scenes in pretty great detail, which is not something I usually do in a review, but it definitely feels right here; SALEM’S LOT is very much a movie oriented towards long windups for brief bursts of shock. That’s not a bad thing per se, and there’s enough diffuse dread floating in the air that, combined with a suitably talented cast (Soul is workmanlike and no more, but the supporting cast of able character actors --particularly a delighted-looking Mason-- keep things afloat) it never feels like the interminable grind it probably ought to. It’s certainly not sleek, though. I mean, you could comfortably cut 40 or 50 minutes of the movie and never miss them in the slightest, which has to count as a mark against it. Maybe someday, someone with a little more warmth for small-town human interest stories could make this material sing a little more and justify the large and meandering ensemble cast. Hooper does a workmanlike job, but it’s obviously not where his heart is, and maybe, just maybe, that kind of thing works better as a novel than a genre movie anyway.****

Thankfully, the highs he hits with the horror stuff certainly make it worth the wait. He even manages, against all odds, to build a suitably harrowing climax, no mean feat in a genre which has been incontestably hobbled since Stoker’s original novel by the fact that vampire stories must end with a completely uncinematic and low-stakes staking-in-their-sleep. There is, to my knowledge, not a single DRACULA adaptation that avoids this inevitable derailment, and it seems that King was classicist enough that he willingly steps into the same trap, even free of most of Stoker’s narrative framework. And yet, Hooper makes it work, mostly! Part of that is the phenomenal set (designed, presumably, by production designer Mort Rabinowitz [Logan’s Run: The TV Series]) which turns the inside of an abandoned house into a surreal, spatially impossible agoraphobic sepulcher; part of it is the startling ferocity (check out the gnarly impalement-on-antlers. How the fuck did they get away with showing this on TV?!), part of it is the way it imagines the recently-vampirized as degenerate junkies lounging around a cult leader (another great trope I’ve never noticed in a vampire movie before), and part is that it allows itself to close on a comfortably depraved grace note once the climax has passed. But most of it is just the simple joy of watching two horror greats play off each others’ strengths. With King setting up the conflict and Hooper executing the visuals, the movie finally consistently delivers on the promise of the pairing, and manages, against all odds, a solid finale worth the wait. Maybe not the 30-something years I waited to watch it, but at least the many unhurried minutes that precede it.

Anyway, SALEM’S LOT is pretty durn good indeed. You should probably not put off watching it for decades like I did. And maybe I wouldn’t have, if I’d known this one last little detail beforehand: it turns out there’s a sequel, RETURN TO SALEM’S LOT, directed by Larry Cohen (?!) and starring Samuel Fuller! What is it about this book that seems to inspire such sublime pairings?

the end.

*I bring up The Loneliest Runner not because I think you’ve ever heard of it, but because it produced what may be the greatest review headline in the entire history of the Boston Globe:

Given the available options I have no choice but to assume it’s a sequel to The Boy Who Drank Too Much.

** Note to self: Hollywood pitch: THE BIRDCAGE, but the parents are vampires and the fiance’s parents are Dr. and Mrs. Van Helsing. And I guess the Hank Azaria character is a werewolf or something. This thing basically writes itself.

*** Huh, for an actor I’d never heard of, Dzundza has an impressive resume including DEER HUNTER, Robert Altman’s STREAMERS, NO WAY OUT, WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART, BASIC INSTINCT, CRIMSON TIDE, and a whole bunch of TV, including a recurring role as one of my favorite Batman: The Animated Series second-string villains, the Ventriloquist. That’s as respectable a run for an 80’s character actor as you could ever hope to find.

**** As I mentioned, there’s a 2004 remake mini-series of the same length starring Rob Lowe, which doesn’t seem to have exactly lit the world on fire, so I can’t imagine director Mikael Saloman (HARD RAIN) did much better with it than Hooper did. But now that these long-running serial shows weighed down with endless water-treading sideplots seem to be what the kids wants, it seems like this is exactly the kind of thing that might translate better to that format. Also unfortunately the 2004 version stars Rutger Hauer as Barlow and Donald Sutherland as Straker, so I guess I have no choice but to watch it someday.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	The Ultimate in Terror. If I had a nickel for every time I’d heard THAT come-on...
TITLE ACCURACY	Technically JERUSALEM’S LOT, but we’ll allow it.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, of Stephen King’s 1975 novel of the same name.
SEQUEL?	Interestingly, the character of Father Callahan (a one-scene minor character in this movie) apparently plays a major role in King’s Dark Tower novels, which to some extent further the story of Salem’s Lot. It’s possible he’s in the already-forgotten movie version of THE DARK TOWER starring Idris Elba. There’s also a mostly-unrelated-sounding sequel film called RETURN TO SALEM’S LOT, directed by Larry Cohen in 1987.
REMAKE?	Yes, or rather, re-adapted in 2004.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampire
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	James Mason and David Soul were still pretty major gets in 1979, I think.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen King, Tobe Hooper
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None, though there is some domestic abuse, which the movie comes perilously close to endorsing.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Brief bat attack.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	One weird thing about SALEM’S LOT is that it really stressed the problem is town actually arises from the “evil house” the Vampires are renting. It’s a weird distinction, but they’re quite clear that it’s the house that was the problem, and it’s just attracted vampires recently.
POSSESSION?	Vampirization
CREEPY DOLLS?	None (?)
EVIL CULT?	There’s nothing really ceremonial or ritualistic about it, but there’s definitely elements of a cult in the way the film depicts the gradual vampirization of the town.
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Bat to vamp, human to vamp
VOYEURISM?	Several short sequences from the stalking vampire’s perspective.
MORAL OF THE STORY	“There is this town, and a vampire moves in, and a local guy has to figure out how to beat it” is probably not a plot that require 183 minutes to resolve. Especially since, at 152,041 words (according to some random website) the novel is positively sleek by King’s standards.

Brain Twisters

Brain Twisters (1991)

Dir. and written by Jerry Sanguliano

Starring Farrah Forke, Terry Londeree, Joe Lombardo

            In the early 1990s, there was a low-simmering fear that computers were going to turn us all into psychotic killers (see, EVILSPEAK, BRAINSCAN, LAWNMOWER MAN, BRAIN TWISTERS). Nowadays, of course, we know that was silly. They only encouraged us to turn into psychotic killers by exposing us to a constant undiluted barrage of humanity’s darkest and most unrestrained compulsions all day, every day, year after year. Most of us just turned into passive piles of clinically depressed glucose, and the rest became aggrieved, reactionary monsters furiously sending rape threats to any woman online who had the audacity to disagree about what Luke Skywalker would do in a given situation. But mostly not psychotic killers, by and large, with probably only a few hundred exceptions a year. So, bullet dodged.

            Back in the innocent days of 1991, though, we had no idea that’s what would happen. In fact, this movie alleges, we didn’t really know what would happen if students were exposed for minutes at a time to abstract pixelated computer animation. It might very well twist their damn brains, for example! Which is, in this case, exactly what happens when the villainous professor referred to alternately as “Dr. Phillip Roth” or “Dr. Phillip Rothstein” (the credits say “Dr. Phillip Rothman,” but what do they know? Let’s just call him “Dr. Phil”) (Terry Londeree, 40th-billed in the Mormon romantic epic THE WORK AND THE GLORY, no other credits) begins subjecting students to some sort of experiment where they watch an 8-bit light show in a little darkened booth while a trippy electronic soundscape plays. Needless to say, it’s not long before one of them (this guy Ted, Shura McComb, no other credits) cracks up, possibly murders his girlfriend (though I don’t think that’s ever definitively established), freaks out at a pinball machine while being interviewed by police, and leaps out the window to his death. 

This is certainly tragic, but would not seem sinister or suspicious in any way, because let’s face it, college students are ridiculous and barely able to stay alive even in the best of conditions (in fact, one of the first emails I received upon arrival to college was a campus-wide communication from the university, begging in apparent helpless desperation for students to please for the love of god stop falling out windows.) There would be absolutely no way to link this dork Ted’s odd behavior to these experiments, except that Dr. Phil gets uncomfortably possessive about the corpse, claims it for himself and demands the cops get a judge to force him to release it, a move which he seems to regard as super slick but definitely, uh, raises some red flags with law enforcement. Even when he gets a court order, he huffs, “I have some imperative matters to accomplish. I’ll be there in an hour,” and storms off, which Detective Frank Turi (Joe Lombardo, PLEASE DON’T EAT THE BABIES) seems to think is rude but not completely outrageous behavior. Turi smells a rat, but since it would be pretty crazy for him to immediately jump to the conclusion that a professor is driving his students insane by subjecting them to a groovy screen-saver, Dr. Phil continues his experiments, all the while being pushed forward by a nefarious business concern which apparently wants his research for a video game? Which I think is supposed to brainwash kids and turn them into mind control agents, although it’s not clear that Dr. Phil is aware of the potential applications of his pure science.

Also there is the main character, White Girl #1 (Farrah Forke, Wings, Lois and Clark, HEAT) who is a college student of some sort, and will perpetually be hovering on the outskirts of all this stuff without ever being directly involved. I believe she will be mentioned exactly one more time in this lengthy review, when she is served a plate of spaghetti.

            BRAIN TWISTERS almost immediately gets down to the business of dragging out a bunch of cheerfully dumb cliches, starting with a rare combo deal of two of my favorite college cliches at once: 1) the professor makes the only relevant point he’s going to make in a presumably hour-long class just as the bell rings, and 2) our protagonist walks into class late, just before the only point we need to hear is being made. Separate, the two are still lazy movie cliches, but combined they becomes a bit surreal as we’re left to accept this young woman casually walks into the class literally seconds before the bell rings. That’s no way to get an education!

            With its standard shady-corporate-science-gone-too-far hook and an even more standard vanilla detective snooping around while a bunch of disposable cracker college kids and their one affirmative action friend get bumped off, BRAIN TWISTERS gamely sets itself up for being exactly what you imagine it is. But of course, this isn’t just some hacky B-movie cranked out by AIP or Cannon or somebody. This is a first-time director working for the prestigious Crown International Pictures, whose regal moniker is somewhat belied by their official website, which appears to have been put up shortly after BRAIN TWISTERS premiered in 1991 and left in its pristine original form ever since. When you think of B-movies, you might think of BLOODSPORT or something. CIP (which had been around since the late 50’s, and made a film as recently as 2003!) was not making BLOODSPORT. Hell, it was not even making AMERICAN NINJA 3: BLOOD HUNT. It’s making things like BLOOD MANIA or CRATER LAKE MONSTER or BLUE MONEY, which identifies its genre as "Soft-Porn" :

CIP is probably best known for the terrible-movie classics THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS and MADMEN OF MANDORAS: THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN, films so unbelievably insane and incompetent that they transcend puny human judgements like “good” or “bad.” Granted, those were made in the early 60’s, but the reviews of more recent fare do not suggest that experience improved their creative process much.** And so it was that even in 1991, director Jerry Sanguliano (filming in Scranton, Pennsylvania) managed to make something which is not just terrible, but somtimes terrible in confusing, inexplicable ways which make one wonder how recently Sanguliano had actually watched a real movie.

So right after the opening salvo of cliches, things get more offbeat. First, a major shock: this turns out to be a rare and possibly even unique college movie where a student tries to sleep with a creepy professor for a better grade, and he actually turns her down and tells her to work harder! (Or, alternatively, participate in his evil experiments). Wow, the times, they are a’changing! Of course, someone has to bang the sexy co-ed, I mean, come on, Sanguilio may not have seen that many movies, but he knows that much. So they just have the cop investigating the murder/suicides of all her friends do it, which is hopefully not standard police procedure in these cases. Here’s a good mental health tip, ladies: If a cop ever tells you he has to talk to you about the details of your friends’ grisly murder/suicides case that he “can’t get into over the phone,” and then proposes he come over to your house and tell you over dinner...  just say “no.” It can only lead to tedious conversation and inappropriate behavior with a side dish of mind-control murder (and a plate of ostentatiously elaborately prepared ...spaghetti... that both he and the movie agree makes him pretty much the greatest chef since Boyardee).

"I'm not used to an electric stove!" he grouses, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of heat which does not originate with visible flames. This is after chiding this broke-ass college student, who has to work in a creepy lab after school just to make ends meet, about having an insufficiently gourmet selection of herbs. Solid police work, dude.  

Inexplicably, though, this blatant feint towards a more prurient appeal doesn’t actually lead to the expected softcore payoff. They passionately make out in a cramped kitchen, sure, but no clothing whatsoever is removed. In fact, you’ll notice as BRAIN TWISTERS grinds along that it features all the standard beats of a sleazy exploitation movie -- forbidden love subplot, shower murder, even an extraneous bath scene… and yet, not only is there no nudity, there’s not even a hint of T n’ A unless you’re into the tops of people’s shoulders under a mountain of bubbles. Without any leering nudity to distract you, your mind might well start to wander to other topics, such as “gosh, is there any blood in this movie, either?” There are a few deaths, but two happen off-screen, and the only one I think we actually see is a scissor-slashing which results in a thin line of blood on the victim's’ neck, briefly glimpsed as he falls over. The movie claims to be rated R, but unless they dropped some profanity in there that I didn’t notice, I sure can’t imagine why.

After a while, finally it becomes clear that this low-rent horror movie isn’t peddling sex or violence (and it’s certainly not selling itself on high drama) and that it’s instead putting all its eggs in the visual effects basket. Which translates to: a lot of the movie is spent watching oscillating colored squares, which was about the coolest thing computers could produce on the cheap in 1991. Alas, I’m afraid it doesn’t quite hold up as a reason to watch an entire 91 minute movie the way sex and violence reliably do. But I guess it’s cool in a lame sort of way. At any rate, I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.

I mean, there were things that could have been built on, here. The cast seems to be making an effort with their inane, glacially paced dialogue scenes. Londeree, as the villainous professor,  acquits himself nicely enough by doing a solid John Glover (IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS) impersonation, which is fine, because I like John Glover.** And some credit is due to the filmmakers for (whether by amateurish naivety or intentional undermining expectation) not going the obvious route with the villainous professor character. (SPOILERS for a movie you’re definitely not going to see) Any normal movie with this plot would posit him as a sociopathic villain recklessly killing off students for personal gain. He seems real shady and he’s definitely a jerk, but... it turns out he is genuinely surprised that his experiments are killing people, and as soon as he learns, he stops doing them! In fact, since he’s also been experimenting on himself (as we glean from a SHINING-esque glance through his notebook as it chronologically becomes illegible and insane), he’s really just as much a victim as the dead kids, which sort of retroactively explains his bizarre behavior.

There’s a scene later in the movie where he acts really weird to our ostensible heroine (OK, one more mention of her, you caught me) and creepily offers her ice cream (“Vanilla? Come on Laura, be a little daring!” he says, with a weird mix of off-putting strangeness and genuine earnestness, like he’s really trying to inspire her with some wise advice). It would be a pretty standard “overtly friendly sinister guy” scene if we hadn’t just learned that his mind is so scrambled he can’t even write legibly anymore. I think he might genuinely believe he’s being friendly and helpful, and isn’t aware he’s a few pinball machine dings away from turning into a homicidal maniac. It’s kind of a tragic direction to take with the ostensible villain, and it really could have been a potentially interesting character if the movie ever realized it (hard to know if Londeree does get it, or if he just stumbled naively into an interesting portrayal through incompetence, but there’s definitely something intriguing in his performance, if not the script). 

The other parts, alas, are not even in the same time zone as “potentially interesting,” and so any effort on the actors’ parts adds up to exactly nothing. In fact, the harder they try the more dull they make it, since their efforts aren’t anywhere near enough to create actual drama, but are more than enough to ensure you won’t have much fun snickering at their ineptitude (well, maybe the guy who plays Ted.)

The sound designer also seem to be making a real effort, using atonal glitchy computer sounds to depict the killers’ electronically fried mental state. Again, it’s not even remotely close to making the thing watchable, but at least it’s a net gain for the movie. And there’s a Halloween party with masks and stuff, where the only actual “kill” takes place. It’s badly lit and the masks are lame, but it was a thought. You can imagine a remake with a few more genre goods and a good deal more (or less) competence making something less bland out of these elements. Not this time, though; I’m sorry to say so, but mostly it’s not even incompetent in an interesting way. It’s a bad tale badly told, but even at that it’s just too stale and uneventful to even be worth more than a fitful chuckle. The ugly, overlit 1990s photography and borderline competent but witheringly dull characters can’t really be blamed for its failure --it was a lost cause from the start-- but certainly do their part to doom it to rightful obscurity.

There is one cheerfully ridiculous bit that made me laugh out loud, though: once it’s become clear that prolonged exposure to microsoft paint is having deleterious effects on the experimental subjects, Dr. Phil calls up his evil financial backer and yells at him that he thinks this research is “the cause of all these murders and suicides around here, don’t you understand?” and the guy denies it in pretty specific terms and hangs up, then indulges in a few minutes of quiet post phone-call reverie while staring thoughtfully into the distance. That in itself isn’t so funny, except that the next shot changes from a close-up to a long shot… and suddenly we see that he’s not in his office, he’s sitting at the head of long desk in a meeting with about twenty other people, patiently waiting for him to remember they're still there! They’re in on the conspiracy too, but man, it was pretty rude of him to take this phone call right in the middle of a meeting! 

(I'm also not sure where those curtains and window came from, but let's not linger on that)

Anyway, I take no pleasure from saying this, but BRAIN TWISTERS has held up about as well as its still-active website, which you should definitely check out (inexplicably under the title FRACTALS, which IMDB assures me is actually a long-gestating 2013 sequel with an identical cast and plot, even though the photo montage in the website is obviously from this movie). In fact, irony of ironies, watching it is probably more likely to drive you to murder-suicide than any pixelated light show ever could. But if something this dull was going to push you over the edge, that’s really sort of on you, anyway.

* Though my favorite IMDB review of 1977’s THECRATER LAKE MONSTER takes an... unexpected perspective to film criticism:  

**Say, whatever happened to John Glover? You couldn’t escape him in the 80s, but it looks like he hasn’t had a single significant role since his stint on Smallville. Did he just get replaced by  William Fichtner? That seems unfair. We could always use more John Glover.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	An Experiment in Mind Control is Out Of Control... And The Body Count is Building!
TITLE ACCURACY	BRAIN TWISTERS seems a kinda mild description of “mental breakdown leading to insanity suicide and murder,” but sure, why not.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Good lord, no
SEQUEL?	None, although IMDB seems to erroneously suggest that FRACTALS is a sequel
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Techno-Anxiety, mind control
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Is Farrah Forke considered A-list because of Wings? No, right?
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	Mind control
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Definitely
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	The evil corporation is watching and surveilling people
MORAL OF THE STORY	Studying harder in college is a good way to avoid having to sleep with your creepy professor or having your mind twisted! Do yourself a favor and show up for class before the bell rings, even if it’s just to hear the one important sentence in the hour-long class!