Dorathen
Better Late Then Never
Ogosmith
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
Tyreece Hulme
One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
soulexpress
Dr. Phillip Rothman (Terry Londeree) is a biophysicist who teaches at an unnamed college. With funding from a software-development company, Dr. Rothman conducts auditory-stimulation experiments on student volunteers. Problem is, once they're back in the outside world and encounter a light pattern similar to the experiments, it turns them into violent serial killers. Not a bad idea for a sci-fi chiller, but BRAIN TWISTERS landed far short of its potential.The stereotyped characters include the heartless CEO (Robert T. Hughes), the mad scientist (Dr. Rothman), the good girl (Farrah Forke), the shameless floozy (Donna Bostany), the no-nonsense police detective (Joe Lombardo), the creepy custodian (Charles Lopresto), and the big bad government agent (Warren Cox?).Londeree rarely changes facial expressions, and delivers his lines in a monochromatic drone. When Rothman tells his work-study student, "I'm a little on edge today," he does so because we never would have guessed otherwise. While Londeree stands out as even more wooden than Kevin Costner, the other cast members do no better. But how can they, with a script that doesn't give them characters so much as stick people they have to flesh out themselves?The custodian is superfluous. He spends all his time alone and does not contribute to the plot in any way. The character must have been tacked on to stretch the film's length to an acceptable 90 minutes for release to theaters.The camera work is nothing special, though I liked the close-up shots of the bubbles in a female student's bathtub scene moments before she suddenly becomes a double murderer. This petite young woman takes out a pair of football players with her scissors. Sounds plausible, huh?Finally, the synthesized score is repetitive and irritating. And let's not even talk about the film's original pop songs! Thankfully, BRAIN TWISTERS never produced a soundtrack CD.I gave the film two stars because at least it wasn't boring.
Bezenby
This film is very much like the superior Strange Behaviour, except there's no Tangerine Dream on the soundtrack and it's more boring. A high cheese factor does help, however. College kids who get involved with some professor's experiments end up killing people and then themselves. The professor's doing this on behalf of some evil corporation who have folks around just in case everything goes wrong, which, this being a horror film, it does.Just to show how engaging this film this, I've forgotten the names of every single character. There's the main girl who works for the professor, and then there's the professor, who's kind of all over the place acting wise, and then there's this police guy snooping around the professor while trying to put the moves on the girl, while the evil corporation try to quietly clean everything up by shooting people in broad daylight, broadcasting freaky energy waves onto the girl's television, and generally arsing things up.I know it was released in 1991 but this film has a full on eighties cheese factor on the go. However, there's not much by way of nudity or gore to liven up the cheap proceedings, so if you're intending to watch this one be well warned. The ending is also a bit of a head scratcher (with the worst looking console game ever).Also – I'm not sure of why the evil corporation where doing what they were doing in the first place.
SoapboxQuantez08
Certain collegians have been losing control in a town, and the reason could be subliminal experiments by one of the professors. At the center of the film is Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke), a college student who befriends a detective. Early in the film, a teen is so beyond help that he panics during the detective's first-murder questioning, and leaps out of a building just for a crime he wasn't guilty of. At one point: a subliminal attempt is made on Laurie, while she and the detective are having dinner, and it seems he's going to get his groove on. Instead, she snaps out of the phase, and he winds up with spaghetti tossed on his shirt. There are pretty bizarre killings, as people are losing control, and people are murdered during a party halfway through. Only Detective Turi can protect Miss Stevens, and stop the pandemonium before it's too late. X-Files episodes involving mind-control (Blood, Wetwired) clearly took a page out of this one.
Tom DeFelice
College students are being turned into killers by a large corporation when they watch a video screen. This is the premise of "Brain Twisters". The basic problem with this low budget horror/sci-fi film is that it is just so middle-of-the-road. Too good to be bad and not bad enough to be a guilty pleasure, it is just mediocre. The film is "G" rated for all but the last five minutes when it turns "PG". Such stalwarts of this low budget genre as gross-out violence, naked young bodies and serial sexual acts are completely missing. The killings are either off-camera or back to camera. The only attacks fully on camera are a fake beer bottle to the head, fingernails to the throat, and cooked spaghetti to the face. And when someone is killed, there is virtually no blood! The language is entirely sanitized except for two words near the end ( a f__k and a s__t). There is no nudity. The one bath tub scene has enough bubbles in it to cover Mt. Everest. This film proves once and for all that gratuitous nudity, sex and violence may not help a low budget horror flick...but it won't hurt it either.
