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If you're in the mood for a trip down a mental rabbit hole featuring two solid, well-liked character actors in early-career roles:Brain Dead (1990, Adam Simon) 'Reality is in the brain.' This one little line, delivered offhand during a conference meeting, nails down Adam Simon'sBrain Dead quite succinctly. It's a rubber-reality movie about brains that misfire, lose their way and generally don't work as they're supposed to. Initially, it's Jack Halsey's brain that has stopped working properly; Halsey (played in a gloriously eccentric performance by professional glorious-eccentric Bud Cort) is a mathematician who one day up and kills his wife and kids, then promptly destroys the work he's been doing for the Eunice Corporation. Corporate company man Jim Reston (a slick, reptilian Bill Paxton) enlists brain surgeon Dr. Rex Martin (Bill Pullman), an old friend with revolutionary theories on biology and psychological brain function, to cut the crazy out of Halsey: either Halsey gets better and remembers the formula Eunice so desperately needs, or he turns into a vegetable and can't give said formula to anyone else. But after being hit by a car while leaving the sanitarium where Halsey is being kept, Martin gradually realizes that maybehis brain isn't working so well, either... and hey, what's with that blood-covered guy in the white suit he's been seeing around lately... You get the gist. Pullman plays this wonderfully - initially an affable, awkward fellow, he slowly lets his creeping paranoia turn him into a rambling, shouting ball of defiant scrambling energy. The deft screenplay, adapted from a script by the late, great 'Twilight Zone' writer Charles Beaumont, allows certain symbols and names to recur without feeling overly insistent, and if it's a bit on the nose at times (the Conklin Mattress Company's slogan, seen on the side of the truck that hits Pullman, is, 'To sleep, perchance to dream,'), it also has a lighter touch than expected. (There are even knowing nods in the direction of H.P. Lovecraft andShock Corridor.) Meanwhile, the director keeps things moving at a good clip without losing the basic thread of sense - whileBrain Dead is tricky, it's never haphazard. Simon climbs into Dr. Martin's consciousness at one end, careens through until he tumbles out the other and wraps it up in an appropriately ironic location. It's a fun trip.
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