Man With The Screaming Bruce!

I'll say it up front -- the comic book is better than the movie. I'm a big Bruce Campbell fan (as this week's posts demonstrate) but as much as I want to like his independent project movie The Man with the Screaming Brain, I have to confess it fails in a number of respects. It's not the acting, which is top drawer or the very worst next to it. It's not the story, which is winner, filled with twists and turns and even a bit more. There are even scenes I like a whole bunch such as the delirious race across the town by the titluar "man with the screaming brain" and the raft of Soviet statuary which in some reflects the thematic points. But what the movie lacks, and it took the comic to show me, is atmosphere. Simply put this is a classic Frankenstein-inspired story which needed the dark of night to sell its wares and all of the story as seen on small screen is in bright unrelenting and unrepentant sunlight. 

I know that Bruce and company had to make the movie on a shoestring and had to go to Bulgaria to make that happen. So I'm not a hater of the efforts it took to put this story on the screen at long last. Apparently Campbell and his partner David Goodman had been trying to make this movie for nearly twenty years before they were able at long last get it done for the Sci-Fi Channel back in the early part of this century. This is a story which grew out of the same heady brew that birthed Evil Dead II and Re-Animator, both movies with bigger budgets and scuds of atmosphere. If the movie had been made for about the same money as those, it might well have shined (or better "gloomed") in its own singular hideous way. 

But alas bereft of enough cash, the outing falls short despite the strong acting efforts of Campbell and company. The special effects are simply not special enough to convince even for a moment and the robot they ended up with looks more like a leftover from a Devo video. The sets were scattered and reminded of the loathsome efforts of a Jerry Warren flick. (It hurts me to say that given how much I admire Bruce and what he tries to deliver.) 

I suspect that Campbell and Goodman just had to offload this project from their psyches and move on, and are happy enough with that. But even in the introduction to the comic book adaptation by artists Rick Remender and Hilary Barta working from the shooting script, Goodman admits and says Bruce agrees that the comics gets it righter. I wish it weren't so, but then at least the movie triggered a really entertaining comic book. Get it! Get the movie too, because even less than stellar Bruce is pretty diverting.

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