Horror High

Wow... Reading through these comments is giving me goose bumps! For years, no one I asked had ever seen (or heard of) this nasty little movie, but now I see that I am not alone after all!

My experience of Twisted Brain is nearly identical to many others here: I was 11 years old when my best friend and I saw this movie on Pittsburgh, PA's Chiller Theater. Ever since that night, I have never looked at a paper-cutter or a pair of cleats the same way.

As many of you have said, there is something about this gritty, low-budget shocker that just sticks with you. It's not that this is a good movie, but obviously it had a lasting impression on a whole generation of us. Even now, I can remember the grainy film and cheesetastic music, the vat of acid, the brutal murders. I will never forget that first viewing of this film.

I can't say that I recommend it, exactly. It may be a you-had-to-be-there kind of experience for those of us who saw it back in the day, and I'm sure Twisted Brain may not hold up well after all these years. I'm just really glad to read that so many others had the same experience of it that I did.

Considering the budget, I have to say this movie really succeeded. It had some great seat-jumper moments far above what I hoped to see in a film of this caliber. The chemistry test scene was utterly delicious. The acting was really very good -- you could tell everyone was serious about making this movie even though they really had no business doing that. The pace was good, the story was sound, the makeups and costumes were good (especially with what had to be a buck-ninety-eight effects bankroll), most of the camera work and stuff was pretty good. And so it actually worked! Unexpected in a movie that dares to take "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" into the recess yard.

Like many impressionable adolescents within late-night or Saturday-afternoon viewing range of WOR (Channel 9) or WPIX (Channel 11) in the mid to late seventies, I developed an early affection for this, the perfect adolescent horror clunker. Yes, the papercutter. Yes, the acid vat. Yes, the cleats. And hell yes... Mister Mumps. Whatever Pat Cardi's shortcomings as an actor, he made a convincing tortured high-school Jeckyll & Hyde. I never found it particularly terrifying except perhaps for that hideous ballad in the background as Vernon rides his bike to school, but it's far more compelling in a (relatively) innocently creepy way than the slicker and more cynically formulaic eighties slasher flicks that followed. Like 'Plan 9' and 'Silent Night, Bloody Night' (both big in the 9/11 universe, and endlessly repeated since the broadcast rights must have been cheap... thank Jah I came of age before the infomercial era), it rightly belongs to the Cinema of Obsession, all the more convincingly when you're 16 and watching it for the fifth time at 2:45am.

There's something to be said for a teen revenge flick that could have plausibly been written and directed by a pimply adolescent.

Reading some of the other comments reminded me that this was also one of the films that made me realize that my early tastes in cult film weren't nearly so obscure as I thought. I remember being flabbergasted as a junior in high school circa 1979 to meet a fairly cute, well-adjusted girl from another school who had seen it three or four times

Scrawny, but good-natured Vernon(PAT CARDI, in a memorable performance) is a science-minded high school nerd, and an unassuming human target for cruelty who's belittled and abused by nearly everyone he knows(moronic jock schoolmates, choleric teachers, the psycho janitor, etc.). He concocts and ingests a substance which renders him a Jeckyll/Hyde type beast, the more powerful and assertive(and certainly more dangerous)persona emerging sporadically to become the "normal" Vernon's savage avenger. A sharp and suspicious investigator has his eye on Vernon, as does the school beauty queen(because the prettiest girl in school is always in love with the skinny, picked-on science geek. She knows he's gonna be rich some day...)

This bouncy little Crown International Pictures wonder was a perennial staple on late-night creature feature shows during the 70s and 80s, and those of a certain bracket remember it fondly. Folks today should get a kick out of its funky retro panache, and they may be surprised by the potent violence in some scenes(nicely punctuated by jarring heavy-reverb guitar thrums).

An all time great...of sorts. 7/10.

While very low-budget, this is still a pretty enjoyable simple horror film. A gawky, geeky high school student gets bullied by his teachers and classmates. He gets revenge.

How he gets revenge is foreshadowed by the fact that the movie begins during an English class in which the teacher has finished showing the first half of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie. Twisted Brain is itself a sort of Jekyll and Hyde remake. The student accidentally handed in a biology report instead of his paper on Stevenson, and the teacher gives him an F on the Stevenson report, and chops his biology paper up with her paper cutter. Those old paper cutters are like machetes! Turns out the student was working on a potion to change the physical strength of living creatures. After his guinea pig kills the janitor's cat, the janitor forces him to drink the potion for some reason, and there's conveniently a barrel of acid in the lab....

Meanwhile, he finds he's less shy in his normal form and starts warming up to a girl he had a crush on. Like Jekyll, the potion also starts trying to change him even when he hasn't drunk it.

I watched it on one of the DVDs in Rhino's Horrible Horrors Vol. 1 box set. It's not horrible, just cheap. Apart from the gore scenes, it almost feels like a Saturday morning TV movie. It's too bad there's not a commentary track.