Director Kevin S. Tenney, the mind behind eighties cult classics like "Night of the Demons" and "Witchboard" aims about as low to the ground as possible with a mini-budget horror comedy that's neither scary nor funny. I guess it takes a special kind of mind to appreciate what Tenney has to offer audiences, but I just couldn't find the fun in what was really just a series of misfires in an unfocused muddled movie that, in the end, is just a waste of time. I enjoy horror movies where you have to just go on auto pilot and not ask for logic, but "Brain Dead" asks almost too much from its audience. It's never sure if it wants to be a zombie movie, an alien movie, or a survival movie, and when Tenney has the chance to turn this in to a tense movie about strangers holed up in an abandoned house, it's still just a mess and sometimes an endurance test. Tenney never really makes much of an explanation for anything in this movie, and when he tries not even he can slow down long enough to convince us we should be buying this malarkey. With a prologue of a news segment, "Brain Dead" sets down in the woods where a fisherman is conveniently hit in the head by a falling meteor that happens to be housing an alien slug. After turning in to a zombie and eating his friend, he wreaks havoc in the woods turning others in to his army.

There's a pointless skinny dipping scene, irritatingly bad special effects, and monsters who appear at just the right time to move the story along, and disappear when Tenney wants his cast to bicker about surviving and finding a way home. The monsters though merciless and violent are about as goofy as I've ever seen, and this becomes more of a fact as Tenney draws a villain he doesn't really understand. They eat brains, but they also pro-create through sludge, but they can also hide slugs in to women's private parts. They have super strength but can't bust down a door. They're quick and sneaky but can be seen in pitch darkness to be caught by our heroes. The cast is all relatively ho hum and forgettable save for Joshua Benton who is for some reason given the floor and shoots zingers at characters like it's going out of style. Whether Tenney intended to invent an Ash hero, or asked Benton to improvise dialogue, the character Clarence's routine gets very old very quickly with jokes and one-liners that fall brutally flat. The rest of the movie is your basic run and hide horror film as the monsters motives are never made clear, and Tenney just ends the film on a goofy note that does little to sell the credibility of what feels like one glorified home made horror movie. In the end, I was seriously expecting better from the guy behind such cult classics and just got another humdrum "Evil Dead" wannabe.

I really wanted to enjoy this on a base empty guilty level, but like one big flat joke, "Brain Dead" wears out its welcome well in to its set up and with horrific writing, terrible humor, painful writing, and a rather jumbled villain that ultimately makes no sense and proves to just be a waste of time. Kevin S. Tenney really isn't re-claiming his cult crown any time soon with junk like this.