Tag Archives: Texas Theatre

The Brain (1988)

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The last time I saw Joe Bob Briggs host a movie live, it was before I had started this website, to give you an idea. But Mary got tickets for my birthday, and on June 30th I made my way to Oak Cliff and the semi-infamous Texas Theatre to once more bask in the glow of my very favorite drive-in movie review critic. Unlike last time[1], he gave just a big introductory presentation of the way brains came into horror. He held court about old books that spawned old movies, in which existed floating brains or people with control over brainwaves or that perennial favorite “both”, along with digressions into actors and careers and eventually drive-in totals about the movie under discussion, and it was a lot, and it was cool, but then I just watched the movie straight through without consistent dissection of it scene by scene, which means I feel like I’m allowed to review it myself without everything having already been spoonfed to me.

The Brain is a Canadian movie about an evil scientist who for unexplored reasons has a giant brain at his Psychology Research Institute, and also he has a weekly TV show about Independent Thinking, and you can tell everything you need to know about him[2] by the fact that his show about thinking independently has applause and smile lights for the studio audience to obey.

Later, a high school kid who is smart but gets into trouble a lot[3] is sent to the PRI to learn how to not get in trouble a lot, by which we mean to get brainwashed by the giant brain, only he’s semi-immune (because he’s smart? randomly? who can tell), so he escapes and starts trying to find a way to figure out what’s going on and eventually defeat the giant brain. Mostly, this consists of running. A lot. Up and down stair wells, too. Sometimes the giant brain is chasing him, often it’s an orderly of the type you see beating on catatonic people in mental hospitals, and basically never is it the evil scientist.

Also, the high school kid has a girlfriend.

If I have not made this clear already, the movie a) does not make a lick of sense and b) is so dumb it’s funny. Cannot recommend to basically anyone, but it really is funny.

[1] I Spit on Your Grave, with commentary between basically every reel. One of my top cinematic memories.
[2] This is before the giant evil brain reveal, you see, which I suppose would have served a similar purpose if not
[3] Without being certain what else he had done before, his current troubles revolved around flushing some sodium (the literal element, not the health scare) into the school plumbing, whereupon it exploded a lot, getting some teachers wet.

John Dies at the End

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You guys. I am so embarrassed about this right now, and it’s going to be probably the worst review ever, but… I’m like four reviews behind, and at this point I can no longer separate out John Dies at the End the movie from the book that spawned it. At least, not in a meaningful way that I would use to form a discussion about it. In a way, that’s good; I mean, it wasn’t so awful as to make me wonder why they made the movie at all. In another way, it’s certainly bad as it did not transcend its source.

No, you know what? That’s not bad by default, I’m completely wrong about that. It’s great when an adaptation sees into the heart of the source material and creates something new, that part is true. But there’s no shame in making people remember, giving vision to words on a page, and broadening the audience. Which is the thing about this one: I hadn’t read the book in (apparently) six years, so I didn’t remember a lot, but every time some new event occurred[1], it all came right back, and yeah, I can dig that.

The plot is sufficiently strange that I’m not sure it’s worth explaining, except I have a thing that depends upon you knowing a little. See, there’s this drug on the street called Soy Sauce, which gives its users the ability to see through the barriers of time and space. And, okay, that’s pretty awesome, except that some users die horribly or are attacked by the things they can see that nobody else can. Everything else is a spoiler, except you should know that David and John are the two people standing in the way of all of this certain doom.[2]

The point of all of this is that I learned a very important lesson. See, I saw the movie at the Texas Theatre, which is known solely for being where they caught Lee Harvey Oswald, y’know, later that day. It has been somewhat remodeled, and now includes a bar. And the bar had a special related to the movie of the hour, the Soy Sauce Shot. (Which generated the first of the flashback memories I mentioned earlier.) That’s all exciting and fun, right? So we went for it (Jez and I), and… so, um, it was vodka and soy sauce[3]. Cheap vodka. It…. it tasted about like you’d expect. My lesson, if it was not entirely clear, is this: don’t drink a shot made of cheap vodka and soy sauce.

[1] Prime example: the meat monster.
[2] Trust me, it would be certain doom. Also, you may recognize John’s name from somewhere, so I will elaborate that David is the narrator.
[3] The sauce, not the reality-altering drug.