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BrainscanA peculiar little film, this one. It's also a load of cobblers, despite its best efforts to say something about those less respectable areas of popular culture: computer games and horror films. What's most odd is that the screenplay is by Andrew Kevin Walker, whose Se7en, from the following year, would become a quintessential and highly influential film for the 1990s. Brainscan, on the other hand, feels like a throwback to the 1980s, the era of Weird Science, 'Max Headroom', and even Videodrome.
The hero - of sorts - is Michael Bower (Furlong), who's one of those American highschool "misfits" because he likes heavy metal and horror films. Michael is the kid who gets into trouble with the school principal (Hemblen) because he runs a horror film club. "Don't you see, senseless violence is not entertainment," the principal tells him. Michael is hardly a paragon of virtue - he has a dubious habit of videotaping the girl next door (Hargreaves) in her bedroom - but it's pretty harmless.
Along with fellow geek Kyle (Marsh), Michael gets enthused by a product advertised in their reading material of choice,'Fangoria' magazine. It's an "interactive CD-Rom" horror experience that promises to be "more than just a game", something that "interfaces with your unconscious". "Satisfy your sickest fantasies... enjoy the fear," it says.
Effectively, Michael seems to enter the game world - remember, the mid-1990s was the era when people believed virtual reality would become commonplace and blur boundaries. The film can be lumped with such twaddle as Johnny Mnemonic and Lawnmower Man. Though here, it blends the VR theme with the trappings of Halloween-style urban horror.
Michael's experience with Brainscan results in him killing a man. Just to mess with his head even more, a freaky be-mulleted character who calls himself Trickster (Smith) and crawls out of his TV screen.
Trickster delivers the film's rhetoric about horror film fandom, saying things like, "Real, unreal, what's the difference?", and telling Michael that horror fans want to be more than voyeurs. "You wanted the ultimate experience in terror. Well terror is the doing. It's not watching horror films like some child." Oh really? It really is a surprisingly idiotic film, considering Walker's later credentials.
Oh, and yes, the payoff is as predictable as you'd expect - it employs that device beloved of schoolkids writing short stories. Say no more.
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