The Brain (1988)

A low-budget throwback to old creature-features, The Brain is the sort of cheesy horror movie that aims for mediocrity and mostly hits its mark. Conceptually, it's notably similar to the cult classic, They Live, released the exact same day in 1988, but of course lacking Carpenter's skill. That's not to say The Brain is entirely without merit. As a cheesy, monster/alien invasion flick it has some fun puppetry, and the movie leans into the style of '50s drive-in movies so hard I found myself wishing they'd shot this in black & white. This wasn't made to be taken seriously, so if you're looking for something along those lines, well... honestly, you're still probably better off with They Live, Little Shop of Horrors, or just selecting something from the era this is emulating.

The movie's premise concerns a televised psychologist, Blake (secretly an alien, played by David Gale), who's working with a psychic alien (this one a giant brain puppet with the face of jack-o-lantern and a tentacular tongue) to take control of the population by beaming The Brain's brain waves over the television. Blake also runs a clinic, which is how Jim (Tom Bresnahan) enters the picture. Jim is a brilliant senior prone to practical jokes and mischief, such as flushing a tablet of sodium down the toilet to detonate the school's plumbing. So... more on the "dangerous acts of felony vandalism" end of the practical joke spectrum, but the movie treats it as a relatively minor infraction. Still, it's enough to put him in the position of having to either agree to see Doctor Blake or face suspension and fail to graduate.

He goes to the clinic, and they try to control him. This doesn't work - apparently some minds are capable of resisting The Brain's power, though there's a side effect involving hallucinations. He winds up back at the clinic against his wishes, so his girlfriend, Janet (Cynthia Preston) and his best friend come to rescue him. They succeed in helping Jim escape, but the friend is eaten by The Brain, which is now capable of moving around and devouring people.

Jim and Janet are on the run, but The Brain quickly turns the public against them. The police, strangers, and even their families are manipulated into believing Jim is a murderer. Eventually even Janet is briefly controlled, leaving Jim alone. He manages to escape the police and return to the institute just as they're starting a broadcast with a much longer range. Long story short, he punches the head off of Blake revealing him to be an alien on air, uses the mind-control technology to clear his name and implicate the institute, rescues Janet, then kills The Brain by shoving a convenient canister of sodium into its mouth.

The movie ends happily before an obligatory jump scare showing The Brain. Then the credits start with a disclaimer warning viewers not to attempt the sodium prank at the beginning.

Also, this all takes place around Christmas. Sort of. The Brain is one of those movies where the script makes no mention of the holidays, but they're notably present in the form of background decoration, lights, and a radio song. Christmas is a background element, but it's consistent. Let's consider why.

I'll start with the trivial stuff: the holiday aligns with the timeline for college applications, which is a minor plot point. I can't find a lot of details surrounding the production of The Brain, but I'm guessing this was a situation where the location and dates of filming were based more on opportunity than choice. Call that a hunch - this wasn't a micro-budget production, but this Canadian horror flick was clearly made on the cheap. So they may have found themselves stuck with vaguely wintery imagery and just decided to lean into it. In addition, the movie was released on November 4th, so it's possible the setting was selected to align with that.

I don't think so, though. The holiday decorations do serve a thematic purpose through the film, and it's a somewhat interesting one. As a consistent background detail, they highlight themes of unconscious control and conformity, ideas explored through the film. This is, after all, a movie about people being manipulated by media designed to leave them open to suggestion and compelled to act as drones. The holiday decorations serve as a useful symbol of this control, which in turn is symbolically discarded in the closing minutes of the film when Jim takes out the trash in the epilogue and we see what appears to be the entirety of the family's holiday decorations left out for pickup.

That doesn't make the movie better, but I do think it makes for a neat detail. Alternatively, you could view the holiday elements as a nod towards the camp elements in the film. But if that were the inspiration, I'd expect to see more of them. While decorations appear frequently, they're usually relatively subtle. If the movie were leveraging them for camp, you'd expect them to be gaudy and more pronounced, rather than fading into the background.

Either way, I'm a strong believer that any movie unambiguously set around the holidays should be considered a Christmas movie. However, if you're looking for something where those holidays have a tangible affect on the tone or style of the movie, you'll probably want to look elsewhere.

That said, even if you don't care about the holiday elements one way or another, there aren't an awful lot of compelling reasons to track this one down. I didn't think it was awful, but aside from its nostalgic interest as a '80s throwback to '50s nostalgia (itself probably a throwback to the '30s Universal horror, which was a nostalgic throwback to late 19th-century horror)... this is at best fine on a so-bad-it's-good curve.