When Pazuzu agonizingly screeches, "No one there!" backwards in "The Exorcist"(1973), obviously, he's lying through his demonic teefers, seared by blessed holy water and spoken prayer.He's there, hiding in the innocent little girl's body, posturing for her immortal soul with trickery and deceit.When every frame of tonight's review, Brain Twisters(1990), agonizingly screams, "There's nothing here!" forwards, backwards, and sideways, believe you me, woprophiles, it ain't bullshittin'.Shot unimpressively in its entirety in the Wyoming Valley of Northeastern Pennsylvania(where I happen to be transmitting to you all from) by a director of little skill and even less renown named Sangiuliano, who rightfully lies dormant in the film industry today, like a devastated boat hull resting on the ocean bottom, for the past twenty-one years.He fails miserably in indulging an ambitious(and none-the-less, entirely scareless) plot on a micro-budget and is further hindered by a torpid cast of inert nineties nobodies and ligneous locals who couldn't purvey an on-camera emotion if the oxygen they breathe depended upon it.From the first instance the shabby eighties-style video titles flash on the screen, you know you're in for the bads.Moments after that, you realize that your hopes for entertainingly bad a la Steckler, Lewis, or Milligan have fallen upon the deaf ears of the movie gods, fickle as they might be.If the producers of The Office, a wildly popular Scranton-based sitcom(that I don't watch), screened tonight's review for themselves, they'd relocate the show's premise to Minooka.Or the Honey Pot section of Nanticoke(pronounced(by some): Nannycook).It'd be less detrimental to you to watch your own grandmother slip into senile dementia than giving this a look.As I was frequently heard to say from the backseat of my Cougar on Wednesday nights in the eighties,"Let's get this over with before I change my mind..."
In 1990, mad brain scientists used pricey monitor displays full of 8-bit video graphics to tap the psyche of Northeastern Pennsylvanian hair pigs to commit boringly lemon acts of evil.Or something like that.
Sometime in the late eighties in a ghost town named Scranton, a professor/scientist named Rothman(Terry Londeree. Ever see him in anything else? Me neither.) has fabricated new mind control techniques in his spare time, using horrible Commodore 64-level video graphics to bend the wills of dated-looking Wyoming Valley mid-to-low end hairpig collegiates with ratted out hair and acid washed jeans to wander out into the area rubble and commit poorly simulated acts of mild violence.The experiments, which look to consist of the subject being hooked via headgear up to a television that's broadcasting a deadly amalgamation of white noise with clips of Alf in the Color Caves and Arkanoid mixed in, also seem to cause all the surrounding participants to engage in trite banalities with each other, delivered with more wood than the two hundred and fifty miles from Fort Smith to Strickland Farm, in Arkansas.To untrained ears, what they're doing might pass as "conversation" or "dialogue", if human beings more closely resembled cigar store indians who talked like Keanu Reeves luded up in front of a teleprompter.In between the incessant vapid chatter that transpires between unattractive, embarrassingly dressed Life game pegs that'd bring dullards to tears, two student/volunteers commit seppuku(if phony-lynching yourself in a doorway constitutes that particular term), and another shanks up a pair of dorks at a Halloween party with a pair of stainless steel scissors.If that sounds appetizing to you, just remember...it isn't.Not at all.
You call that a 'suicide by hanging', really?
The slovenly murders, that may or may not the result that the evil software-producing corporation that funds Rothman's experiments was looking for in the first place, signal the arrival of a detective named Frank(Joe Lombardo) to investigate(definition: try and get into the Sasoons of the professor's pupil/guinea pig, Laura(Farrah Forke), by delivering lines like:"Are you a virgin? Like the olive oil?" with a straight face.As a matter of fact, he delivers all of his lines, hokey and otherwise, with the same straight face, due to his intrinsic inability to act worth a fuck.) the case.Uninspired cat n' mouse antics between the professor and the detective ensue, as both men also vie for Laura's attention; the prof has an ice cream date, the cop, a spaghetti dinner.I'm crying on the inside because this isn't all over yet, and I'm forced to watch two guys who, combined, wouldn't match up against a bag of frozen sweet potato fries in a personality-off.There's also a particularly putrid dance club sequence(shot at Market Street Square, of course).In the meantime, this ditch pig with failing grades and a failure of a ratted out hairdo who volunteers for the crappy video tests ends up becoming a psycho(you can tell by the way she changes her eye makeup) who kills with her fingernails.Rothman stalks Laurie, and, to be honest, I don't remember if she lives or not.I didn't care enough to pay attention.At the epilogue, we see a preppy kid playing a shitty video game in his room(Suprise! It's called "Brain Twisters" and it sucks in much the same way as the rest of the movie), and when his mother calls him to dinner, he angrily responds, throwing one of the least intimidating angry grills on that I've ever seen in any movie, anywhere.Cue scrolling video titles and abysmal Casio-realized techno.That one hurt...
Ted "Uncle Ted" Raub deserved a lot better than this...
Farrah Forke followed this up with a long run on television, most notably as a regular on "Wings", and also as an extra in 1995's Pacino/DeNiro vehicle, "Heat".She's quite possibly the only cast member who worked on anything significant afterwards(and with good reason).There's also a name or two in the end titles I know personally, having worked for one of the guys as a barback right around the time this thing was made.I'm gonna refrain from mentioning them, though, they've suffered enough, I'm sure.Congratulations on your worthless piece o'shit, Signore Sangiuliano.No wops whatsoever.
By the time the end titles rolled, I was rocking the exact same expression as this kid, albeit for entirely different reasons.
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