| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
God damn. Here’s one movie that lives up to its name. After watching it, you are it. Brain dead. Now, Barn of the Blood Llama is confusing, but in a different way. Barn is confusing in that it even got made. It makes no damn sense whatsoever and is pretty fucking proud of it. This movie is smart confusing. It’s confusing with a purpose, like David Lynch movies are. Whoever made this knows something we don’t, and there’s things going on here just out of reach. But there are some pretty butterflies. So let’s wade through eighty minutes of pleasantly painful intellectual confusion, and maybe we’ll get to see some of those pretty butterflies at the end, okay? Dr. Rex walks into his lab, where his assistant, Berkovitch, is playing with a disembodied face hooked up to a disembodied brain. He tells Berkovitch to get another brain from the shelf. He grabs and promptly drops the brain, which Rex tells him is the recorded and possibly still thinking memories of the person it was once in. Together, they set about to put it back together and get it a new jar. Jim, an evil corporate type, walks in, and he and Rex chat about their old high school days. But Jim wants to get down to business. He wants Rex to visit a patient at Lakeview Mental Hospital, a man by the name of Halsey, and pick his brain. Halsey is a study in paranoia. He tells Rex a story about a man he used to work for named Conklin, who spies on him in various ways. Rex isn’t interested, he’s simply after some numbers Halsey has buried in his brain. He runs some tests on Halsey and finds that his brain is literally in paranoia overdrive. Jim asks Rex to operate to extract the numbers. They either have to have Halsey’s secret info or destroy him to keep it a secret. Halsey was a mathematician working for Eunice, like Rex and Jim do, but in his madness, he thinks he was an accountant for a mattress manufacturer. Carrying a brain home from work, Rex is accosted by a bum. They fight, the bum claiming Rex took his “goddamn fucking brain, shit, that’s my fucking brain fuck shit goddammit fuck shit fuck.” The brain gets tossed into the air, and in an attempt to save it, Rex gets nailed by a car. He returns to his lab the next day to find that his grant has been pulled, and evil greasy scientist guys are moving in to his space. That night, Rex talks to his wife about how Halsey ended up committed. Turns out he killed his wife and a few research assistants before security detained him. The next day, Rex takes Halsey before the Eunice science division and opens his head. Some crazy shit goes on as Halsey tells them about his family being murdered. He claims a man followed him and killed his family. Rex starts seeing the man he’s talking about, the Man In White, after the surgery as Jim tells him about the possibilities of “memory sculpting.” When Rex leaves Eunice, the MIW follows him. He looses the MIW and meets his wife for a business dinner with Jim and the Evil One himself, George Kennedy. During dinner he gets trashed and ruins the meeting. On the drive home, the MIW appears in his backseat, and when he walks in the house, he sees Jim fucking his wife on the kitchen table. He shoves a long, sharp metal thing through their eyes and wakes up in the hospital where Halsey was kept. A nurse tells him the whole thing was a dream, and then his doctor walks in. The doctor is none other than ol’ MIW. When he freaks, the doctor calls some orderlies, who give him a shot and knock him out. The MIW says that Halsey is his alter ego in his dreams, just before he drops off. Later on, he finds that his office is in reality, doc MIW’s office, right down to the degree from Miskatonic U. Go Cephalopods! In the new reality, Jim is a mattress accountant like Halsey. Rex runs like hell from MIW and goes on a tour of the house of torture that is the MIW’s version of Lakeside. The MIW and his orderlies eventually catch him and toss him in shock therapy. Halsey appears to him post-op and warns him about the MIW. Halsey cuts him free of his bonds and hides from the nurse when she comes back. Rex finds him with his eyes stabbed out in the closet, but he pops back up again when we jump to the previous scene. They’ve both been told that they don’t exist and the other is their alter-ego. Dana and Jim show up, and Rex falls out a window that doesn’t really exist in the closet and lands in an ocean in Halsey’s mind. Halsey promptly gets eaten by a sea monster and Rex washes up on shore just outside a five-star restaurant. He goes into a hotel next door where Halsey has an office, where he finds a huge equation on a chalkboard. He gets a phone call in the office, the men who made the call come for him, and he runs again. He gets back to Eunice, where a limo pulls up beside him. Rex runs to the limo to tell Jim what’s been happening, says they’re all being dreamed by Eunice. When he gets in the car, Jim locks him in, and the MIW is in the backseat. The MIW, it is revealed, is Conklin. Rex is Halsey, he’s the one with the equation in his head, and he ends up with his brain exposed in front of the Eunice suits. Then he’s in a car, speeding out of control, and runs over himself in the beginning of the movie. He’s then getting his head operated on in a regular medical hospital, and dreams that he’s back at Lakeview where Halsey is a doctor. Back at the hospital, Jim comforts Dana as he dies. Back at the "Halsey is a doctor" version of Lakeview, Rex is a lobotomy patient. He pulls open his head and there’s a butterfly inside. See? I told you we’d get to see the pretty butterflies again. Hang on, we’re almost done. And how are we done? He’s a brain in a jar on the shelf in his office. Well, this should be interesting indeed. There, did you follow all that? If you thought that was confusing, try translating the movie into a review that coherent. Good fucking luck. David Lynch is scratching his head wondering why he didn’t direct that, Oliver Stone is smoking pot in the bathroom trying to forget that he watched it, and David Cronenberg is wondering how he could squeeze a vagina-faced typewriter beetle monster in there somewhere. I’m going to bed now. I may not wake up, or I may wake up in Lakeview with butterflies in my brain. Give....my...keyboard to.....Trevor...ugh.
What's a BrainWave?
Fistula
Ferox
Ragnarok Begin.
I think we rented a good movie by mistake.
What crazy horrors of mindfuck cometh my way? It be Brain Dead!
Ignoring Andrew Borntreger's warning to run from George Kennedy movies could be dangerous, but we're professionals. Don't try this at home, kids.
10 Min.
So should you be keeping those brains in glass jars on open shelves?
You know, I bet that all businessman with breifcases have dildos in them.
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the brains!
20 Min.
Eww... Brain stew.
Brainshakes: The wave of THE FUTURE!!
Fuck shit piss fuck, my fucking brain!
30 Min.
george.
George!
GEORGE!!
40 Min.
Boy, he's touchy for being the Prince of Darkness.
George CAN DO anything that he used to - I'll bet he's involved with Microsoft, too.
Madness is merely trying to understand this movie.
50 Min.
This movie's kind of strange.
Zombie Cannibal is worth $6.66! Oh, wait... it's not.
This movie would make David Lynch proud.
60 Min.
Aaarrgh! This movie makes me feel stupid.
Yessiree, Bob, who is your uncle... or something.
That 'getting your eyes stabbed out' is sounding pretty good about now.
70 Min.
No! He's back and everything's all goofy!
Shit! Shit! Fuck! Goddamn! Motherfucker! My cans! Fuck!
Hey, that bum mugged the Doctor and stole his scarf!
End.
That was like a Warhol, but weird.
Apparently I was too dizzy to finish my brainwaves... Shit! Fuck! Damn! Motherfucker! My brain! AAUUGHH!!
Ah, shit. I'm just going to duck into the closet. [Ferox's Note: Hey, when he comes out let's all laugh at him!]
Brother Fistula: All in all, pretty good. It had some good acting, and coupling that with a minimal role for Boy George (Kennedy) and you've got a good thing going. Sadly, the plot was twisted and bent more than Kennedy's crooked dong (I'm guessing, really) and the movie reaches no ending. If I wanted a long dumb story with no ending or resolution I could just watch my life. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad by any means. Just take a Vicatin afterwards. 3 Brother Ferox: I know what happened in this movie. Yes, I really do...well... OK, so maybe I don't know...I...uhh... OK, this damned thing can have a 3.5. Now go away.
Brother Ragnarok: Okay, it's not that hard, but I ain't gonna explain because I think you all should see it for yourselves. The ending is not what you expect, I'll tell you that. I thought it was really really good. I enjoy a good flick like this every now and again, kinda like Lost Highway. Another good trippy Bill Pullman flick. Rock on. And Paxton, well, you can't go wrong there. 4.5. Dig it.
[for another Kennedy flick] Recommended by: Brothers Fistula, Ragnarok, and Ferox Oh, shit! They're coming! I'll just go hide in the closet.
