The Brain Machine

Ouch, what a painfully BORING Sci-Fi movie! And that's especially saddening because the opening 15 minutes were so action-packed and full of potential! During the intro, we follow a bunch of nervous security officers and hired hit men as they chase a doctor who escaped from a mysterious laboratory with a briefcase full of top-secret files. As he's about to reveal the supposedly horrible & inhuman events that take place in the lab, he's executed. Figures… From then on, the 'action' swifts back and forth between two locations, the aforementioned laboratory and the rural mansion of a corrupt senator (or something), and it quickly becomes clear that the experiments are actually the complete opposite of disturbing. More like dull, pointless and vague. Scientists selected four random persons without living relatives and it's really really really really important that they speak the truth even though a giant machine reads the content of their minds, anyway. They all hide dark secrets from their pasts and people suffer when get revealed; yet I fail to see how these tests could ever result in a humanity-threatening device. Perhaps I missed something, but I doubt it. The interactions between the patients and doctors are even less interesting to follow, as really none of them have personalities. So basically, "The Brain Machine" just handles about a bunch of lame people living in an awfully decorated room. The film also could have been half an hour shorter if it weren't for a THOUSAND stagnant shots of buildings! The relocations from the lab to the villa and vice versa are indicated EVERY SINGLE TIME by a five-second shot of the places. Either the makers really needed the padding or they just assumed that all Sci-Fi viewers are morons unable to notice a change of location by themselves. Staring at a forsaken pool with a mansion in the background for the tenth time in only five minutes becomes quite annoying, I assure you. James Best's performance as the reverend with mental issues is rather decent, but one man definitely can't save this thing from being an absolute waste of time. Avoid!

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.

James Best (Rosco From "Dukes of Hazzard") plays an emotionally tortured clergyman who volunteers for a secretive government experiment in this tepid, badly-edited thriller. The other participants in the experiment are: a fat slob, a hillbilly woman, and a wimpy guy played by Gerald McRaney. They seem like normal (if annoying) folks at first, but they all have terrible secrets in their past. The government wants to put these people in something called the "E-Box," which looks like a big cubicle filled with lawn furniture. While inside, their darkest, most embarrassing memories are dredged up for the world to see. Of course, the experiment goes horribly, horribly wrong, and there's a lot of pain, suffering, and death in the last half hour of the movie. The rest is just a rather confusing series of scenes showing big office buildings and people in lab coats. There are about 372 shots of a swimming pool for some reason. If you love establishing shots, THIS IS THE MOVIE FOR YOU. They establish the HELL out of these scenes. The exact point of the experiment remains a mystery to me. Surely, there are cheaper and more efficient ways for the goverment to make people feel bad about themselves. So in summary, "The Brain Machine" -- rent it, won't you?

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.

"The Brain Machine" SHOULD have been an interesting movie. After all, it's about a top secret project where people are told they'd explore mind reading and memory. Of course, there's a darker reason for the experiment...but I was practically comatose from boredom so I really stopped caring after a while. This is because the film is very low energy, has some poor acting and really could have used some serious editing. Instead, it just goes on and on....and you keep waiting and HOPING something happens. Eventually, the subjects all go mad and start doing bad things...but it was frankly too late when the film actually picked up!

The most problematic thing about this film isn't that it's bad...but it's BORING and bad. Some bad films are so bad they're unintentionally funny and fun to watch. As for this one, nothing happens for so long that you have to force yourself to keep watching...which doesn't happen if you watch bad films like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "The Room". So, you'd never want to sit down with your friends and watch "The Brain Machine" to laugh at it....you'd just turn it off and find something else...anything else.