{"id":17878,"date":"2014-10-24T22:26:52","date_gmt":"2014-10-25T02:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=17878"},"modified":"2015-12-11T22:31:30","modified_gmt":"2015-12-12T03:31:30","slug":"brainscan-1994","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/24\/brainscan-1994\/","title":{"rendered":"Brainscan (1994)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"brainscan-1994\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Is it any wonder we don\u2019t have a \u201cBrainscan\u201d movie series by now? Twenty years later, and John Flynn\u2019s horror mystery is still just ninety minutes of absolutely nothing. It\u2019s bereft of scares, tension, and suspense, lacks any kind of interesting characterization, the villainous trickster is a bland pandering horror character that can barely muster up a shiver, and in the end the entire movie is hell bent on demonizing video games and video gamers. If you love killing in video games, odds are you\u2019ll love killing in reality? I had to sit through just endless nonsensical crap for such sanctimonious finger wagging to the audience?<\/p>\n

After a vicious car crash took his mother as a child, Michael is now haunted by her death and given a vicious scar on his knee. That\u2019s important because he apparently doesn\u2019t like people with their whole untarnished legs, as we find out later on. Michael is now a warped young man who lives in a posh house with his absentee father. He wiles his days away listening to heavy metal on his sound system, playing video games on his wide screen TV, speaking to people over his voice activated phone thanks to his robotic butler, and spying on his sexy neighbor with his state of the art video camera. Woe is he. Most of all, he loves to play horror video games. Because he\u2019s warped, you see? He hates life and is in pain so he plays video games not for escapism, but because he\u2019s mentally ill.<\/p>\n

Understand? The movie makes it painfully clear to the audience, in case you don\u2019t. He is given the attention of the new video entitled \u201cBrainscan,\u201d which promises the player an immersive experience unlike anything they\u2019ve ever seen, thus Michael\u2019s troubles begin. Playing the utterly realistic game, he invades a man\u2019s home, stabs him to death, and amputates his leg. The following morning he awakens to discover the murder was real, and this murder was a kind of video game goal that\u2019s invoked the game\u2019s villain \u201cwacky\u201d The Trickster. The Trickster is a bland and boring horror villain resembling a demonic Dee Snider, who really does nothing. He can alter reality to certain degrees, and annoy Michael to no end. He sure as hell annoyed me.<\/p>\n

Michael soon learns the only way he can continue and ultimately end the game, is if he surrenders himself to the trickster, and murder anyone the monster demands. The Trickster revels in Michael\u2019s deeds, insisting that it\u2019s an easy feat, considering video games and reality aren\u2019t that far apart. Where is Michael\u2019s dad? Did no one else play this video game considering it had a full page ad in Fangoria? And what, exactly, is a Reality Enhancing Signal? \u201cBrainscan\u201d is such an irritating horror film, wasting Frank Langella whose role here is to stand around mugging with an intimidating presence, while Edward Furlong is Edward Furlong once again. He screams, screeches, and offers zero range. \u201cBrainscan\u201d is never sure what kind of horror movie it is, but in the end, it\u2019s pretty clear it\u2019s a movie that warns about the dangers of horror video games. It may warp your perceptions of reality. Because no one ever murdered other people before video games existed.<\/p>\n

Go pop in “Arcade<\/a>” instead, and call it a day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is it any wonder we don\u2019t have a \u201cBrainscan\u201d movie series by now? Twenty years later, and John Flynn\u2019s horror mystery is still just ninety minutes of absolutely nothing. It\u2019s bereft of scares, tension, and suspense, lacks any kind of interesting characterization, the villainous trickster is a bland pandering horror character that can barely muster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[120,240,276,349,477,703,1087,1156],"class_list":["post-17878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-movie-reviews","tag-b","tag-crime","tag-demons","tag-fantasy","tag-horror","tag-mystery","tag-thriller","tag-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17880,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17878\/revisions\/17880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}