Rent Man with the Screaming Brain (2005)

Brain Dead - Man with the Screaming Brain review by Count Otto Black

Half an hour into this 90-minute film, I realized I didn't have the slightest desire to waste another hour on it, so I gave up. I supposed I should have guessed that since Bruce Campbell, a C-list actor whose fame rests on having been in the early cult work of a director who later became enormously successful, is not only the star but also wrote, directed and produced, it might not be an unqualified masterpiece. But since he was actually very good in "Bubba Ho-Tep" I thought I'd give him the benefit of the doubt.

I was wrong. While taking forever to set up a plot that apparently owes a great deal to every previous brain or head transplant B-movie, all of which are more fun than this one, the dismal script treats us to endless "jokes" relying on the necessity of the locations and most of the cast being Eastern European to save money. If you think it's hilarious for Bulgarians to talk like urban black American tough guys, only with Bulgarian accents and sometimes subtitles, you might actually smile once or twice as these cardboard clichés go through their poorly-written paces, but I certainly didn't.

Campbell plays a comedy stereotype American capitalist as woodenly as a very wooden thing. Ted Raimi, an "actor" whose movie career exists purely because he has a brother called Sam, attempts a zany Bulgarian accent, pulls wacky faces every single second he's on screen, and generally makes you wish he was dead just so he'd go away, though he does at least cope efficiently with a blatant bit of product placement, which in bottom-feeding Z-movies like this is far more important than being able to act. And an elderly Stacey Keach goes through the motions because he has bills to pay, but still easily steals the film because nobody else can act at all.

Maybe it gets better later on, but if the first third of the movie is this dire, what are the chances? I couldn't even be bothered to skip ahead for a quick look. Like nearly all films that deliberately try to be so bad they're good, it's just plain bad. Give it a miss.