The Brain Machine

I bought this (it was only $3, ok?) under the title "Grey Matter". The novelty of seeing Sherriff Roscoe in a non-DukesOfHazzard role intrigued me. As the other reviewers warned, it's a pretty boring tale of a top secret government experiment gone awry.

And yes, there are plenty of establishing shots, especially of a house with a pool in front of it. Some of the characters and interiors are so nondescript I guess the filmmakers worried we might forget who is who, so they keep tipping us off by first showing the outside of the buildings. It's actually kinda funny. After awhile the pool shot feels like a tv channel's station identification logo, reminding us that we are watching "Grey Matter".

I also enjoyed two bouts of name-calling. At one point an angry test subject taunts somebody in charge by calling her a "Scientific b*tch!". It's just a very inadequate insult. Several scenes later a different subject lets off steam by muttering about that "scientific b**tard!". It just sounded very awkward to me.

Someday this movie will disappear forever. Another decade from now it will likely be impossible to find any copies of it. Almost like it never happened.

I rented this as part of a weekly movie night with a friend of mine. We got this, "The Supernaturals," and "Blood Splash," also known as "Nightmare" or "Nightmare in a Damaged Brain." This was the worst of the three.

We got this under the name "Mind Warp," and decided to get it only because it looked like it could be okay. (Well, why else would we rent it?!) The story is pretty basic. Two doctors stick four people in an underground lab and start doing mental tests on them with these Star Trek computers. (Spare the constant "beep-beep...beep-beep" from the TV show.)

Nothing really happens. The film's first twenty minutes is about an escapee from the lab who has a file showing all that goes on. Apparently, these tests are pretty much illegal. He eventually gets caught and killed off. Then the four people (a war veteran, a priest, a girl, and some other guy) are tested on. It's all really boring until finally they all start going mad and either killing themselves, or each other, until the abrupt and pretty unsatisfying ending.

I say...avoid this. Really. It isn't very good at all. I found it in the horror section, and hopefully if you do, too, you will just pass it by. It has nothing to offer.

While I watched The Brain Machine I thought I must be kind of dumb because I had to keep on rewinding it in order to follow what was going on. I thought it was pretty bad that I was having so much bother understanding an exploitation flick. But subsequently, I have read other reviews and discovered that thankfully I was not alone and it seems to be generally felt that this is one confusing sci-fi thriller. It's about a secret government sponsored experiment where four volunteers are put through a series of tests that cause them to relive dark psychological events from their past including murder and war flash-backs. That makes it sound relatively straightforward but boy it sure isn't. It's edited together in such a way that it's difficult following not only what is going on but also who is who. While it's never in the least bit obvious what the point of the experiment actually is in the first place. The Brain Machine itself is sort of vaguely defined, although lawn chairs with sensors do seem to be an important component of it. There is also a room in which the test subjects are located in which the walls shrink in, which is a way of testing the psychological consequences of overpopulation! It's so random and strange. We have good people and bad people but it's not always even obvious what their motivations are, so character actions are also somewhat eccentric to say the least.

But despite being very low budget and shoddily made, there is something consistently interesting about this film nevertheless. It's kind of endearing that a film with so little money and made for an exploitation audience is so ambitious. While it may not achieve its goals exactly, it falls short in an entertaining and intriguing enough manner. Its very incomprehensibility actually probably does it some favours too, in that you can watch this again and discover new aspects. Like a lot of 70's movies it has a paranoid thriller element, where the government are up to no good. The mixture of conspiracy film intrigue with science fiction works pretty well. It stars a couple of notable people with James 'The Dukes of Hazzard' Best a pervy priest and Stuart 'Russ Meyer' Lancaster as the Senator. I got to say I liked this one's clunky charm and while the story-line is messy, it was at least a little bit different. And that counts for quite a lot.

This is a low-budget 70's film which stems from the cinematic crazes of both the 'evilly-implemented mind control' ('The Manchurian Candidate' and 'The Ipcress File') and 'paranoia about government conspiracy' sub-genres that were fervently expressed in the Vietnam/Watergate era of American cinema. For me, growing up watching James Best as Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in 'The Dukes of Hazzard', it was intriguing to watch him here, as a priest selected as one of 4 paid volunteers for an experiment supposedly run by the ECC, an environmental organization. It ends up that it's just a cover to test an experimental mind-control 'Brain Machine' that the U.S. government wants, in order to keep it's citizens in line, in the name of 'keeping social order'. Admittedly, when one of the directors says that the future is surveillance, I couldn't help but shudder at the parallels to society today, in this post-9/11 era. Unfortunately, the more time that passes, the closer these Orwellian cinematic views of civilization and its discontents come to mirroring the way life has become.

No spoilers, but the machine forces the person to tell the truth. Growing up, I have learned that honesty is not always the best policy. In fact, life has to endure the 'little white lie' in order to have things run peacefully. While no cinematic masterwork, this film more than suffices as Exhibit A for evidence. Definitely worth a watch, especially if you can handle 1970's, TV-movie-style filmmaking.

After watching The Brain Machine in stages because I was fighting fatigue to complete this movie I'm still not sure of what I saw. Four people James Best, Ann Latham, Gerad McRaney, and Marcus Grapes all of whom have no close family volunteer to be paid lab rats for an experimental mind control machine. Two firm prerequisites for these people, no close family and they have to tell the absolute truth in that closed environment that they live in now.

Somebody should have told them to watch The Forbidden Planet and how those far superior Krells couldn't deal with monsters from the ID. My guess is that this top secret experiment was to develop some kind of ultimate interrogation machine. That's why so many sinister forces seem bent on achieving success with the experiment, however success is to be measured. The Brain Machine isn't really clear on what's going on.

The whole thing will leave you bored and confused.