Brainscan

Michael (Edward Furlong) is a sullen, horror-obsessed 16-year-old suburban misfit. Neglected by a workaholic single father, Michael cocoons nightly at his fancy PC workstation, sampling morbid software and on-line games. A magazine ad for a diversion called Brainscan promises a whole new type of gaming experience, and Michael sends away for the CD. When the boy pops it into his drive, he's engulfed in virtual reality (conveyed through conventional cinematography, rather than computer graphics), peering through the eyes of a murderer who stalks and knifes a man to death. Then the first phase of Brainscan ends, and Michael, exhilarated, goes back to the real world--where an identical killing has just shaken the neighborhood. Suspecting the worst, Michael refuses to play the next CD of Brainscan that arrives in the mail. Abruptly a demonic fellow named Trickster (T. Ryder Smith) materializes. Truly a game genie, this punk-attired Freddy Krueger-wannabe threatens, cajoles, and entices Michael to re-enter the Brainscan scenario and cover up the clues he left while committing the first crime. Michael's furtive, frantic behavior inevitably draws the suspicions of snoopy Detective Hayden (Frank Langella, looking like he'd rather be elsewhere) and endangers the closest thing the kid has to a girlfriend, slut-next-door Kimberly (Amy Hargreaves), who strips at her bedroom window regularly for his voyeuristic pleasure. Trickster reappears time and again to change shape, make bleak jokes, and prod Michael to keep playing Brainscan, even as events creep toward certain doom in a climactic shoot-out with Hayden. Then the game ends, and Michael finds himself back at his workstation, shaken but unhurt, and Kimberly is safe. Hayden, the investigation, Trickster, all were just a part of the computer simulation. It was completely unreal. Or ... was it?

Furlong, a novice performer who debuted holding his own against Arnold Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 2, nicely implies the pathos of a lonely boy engrossed in an unhealthy, private twilight zone of horror and dark fantasy, and high-tech fans might revel in his gothic computer setup (especially the screen-generated butler who announces things like "You have a phone call, Master," in Karloff vocals). But mostly BRAINSCAN is a protracted bore, scoring low even on the violence quotient (biggest cheap thrill is a reappearing severed human foot). That the filmmakers go for plodding suspense and a low body count, rather than bloody splatter, is a small virtue, overshadowed by the unedifying and obnoxious Trickster figure--accurately described in the production notes as a graveyard cross between Iggy Pop and Keith Richards--in what is clearly envisioned as a series launch, a la A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. But this film's weak performance at the box office makes BRAINSCAN II: TRICKSTER RETURNS highly unlikely. Or ... does it? (Violence, profanity, sexual situations.) leave a comment