Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The Horror!? 46: The Brain Machine (1977)

MilInCo strikes again. An evil government operation secretly abuses a not terribly well defined experiment about environmental issues (don't ask me, I didn't write the script), consisting of running four volunteers through psychological tests and then locking them into a room with slowly enclosing walls as well as some gibberish about bio-feedback, as a testing ground for their development of mind reading technology. As always, the experiment goes horribly wrong.
This at least surprisingly unflinching TV production could have been a very interesting little SF movie about the themes of paranoia and surveillance or an interesting little thriller about people falling apart under pressure, alas it does not look like the three scriptwriters did agree on what exactly The Brain Machine was supposed to be about. So they opted for the old tactic of very very slowly setting up any damn thing that came to mind (a useless prologue, a whole angle about the scientists not knowing for what their experiments are used and so on and so on), leaving about twenty minutes for half a dozen pay-offs that never really come to pass.
What interesting ideas and psychological intricacies are still left, are then utterly ruined by acting flat as a pancake.

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