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Brain Damage (1988)
PRESS
1988
Time Out no.915 (2 March 1988) p.34 (UK)
While it would win few prizes for narrative sophistication
and visual imagination - the euphoric hallucinations seem to have strayed
in from a '60s LSD movie - Brain Damage does display
a commendable social conscience in deploring the perils of mind-bending
substances (...) The whole thing works better as comedy than horror,
relying as heavily on its disquieting black humour as on images of physical
disgust. - Nigel Floyd
City Limits no.335 (3 March 1988) p.27 (UK)
see
review in the Kim Newman Archive
Variety 20 April 1988 p.18 (USA)
Brain Damage is an overtly ambitious but nonetheless rewarding
low-budget horror film using the monster genre as a timely metaphor
for drug addiction and its ills. (...) At every step, Henenlotter makes
clear the analogy between Brian's plight and drug addiction, including
going cold turkey and radical behaviour changes as a tipoff to family
(...) and friends, etc. Horror format is useful in this regard, heavily
leavened by outbreaks of black humor. - by Lor
Monthly Film Bulletin vol.55 no.651 (April 1988) pp.106-107
(UK)
see
review in the Kim Newman Archive
Cinefantastique vol.18 no.5 (July 1988) pp.48, 55 (USA)
Like (Basket Case),
Henenlotter's newest flick occasionally overcomes the limitations of
the penny-dreadful scenario with an inventiveness and 45-watt sleaze-badge-of-honor
sensibility that's uniquely its own. There hasn't been a genre offering
to rival its queasy mix of ultra-violent slapstick and jaw-dropping
grue since Stuart Gordon's 1985 horror-sleeper The Re-animator
(sic). (...) Although Brain Damage is often
derailed by the same predictable splatter formula which sabotaged Basket
Case's moments of poverty-row vitality, it picks up considerable
steam whenever it settles down to focus on the hallucinatory binges
Elmer induces in his young host (...) The major joy of Brain
Damage, like Basket
Case, is its monster. And Elmer, the brain-snarfling parasite
lovingly embodies the movie's gleefully insouciant, blood-soaked charm
(...) Like Belial in Basket
Case, Elmer's a street-smart huckster with a deadly over-bite,
and it's a hoot whenever he's planning another bout of cerebellum-slinging
in his mellow Disney-narrator tones. But in the end, Elmer is also symptomatic
of the problems of Henenlotter's movie: all the brain-power is on his
side. - Todd French
1999
Fangoria no.188 (November 1999) p.68 (USA)
Arguably the director's best work (and certainly his best-written).
- Michael Gingold
Last Updated:
1 April, 2007
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