| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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BRAINSCAN
Rating: 
USA/Canada. 1994.
Director – John Flynn, Screenplay – Andrew Kevin Walker, Story – Brian Owens, Producer – Michael Roy, Photography – Francois Protat, Music – George S. Clinton, Visual Effects – Telecine Multimedia, Digital Effects – Sidley Wright Motion Works (Supervisor – Art Durinski), Game Entrance Effects – The Post Group, Physical Effects – Ryal Cosgrove, Makeup Effects – X.F.X. Inc (Supervisor – Steve Johnson), Visual Effects & Character Design – Rene Daalder, Production Design – Paola Ridolfi. Production Company – Coral Productions/Summit Entertainment/Admire Productions.
Cast:
Edward Furlong (Michael Brower), T. Ryder Smith (Trickster), Frank Langella (Lieutenant Hayden), Amy Hargreaves (Kimberly Keller), Jamie Marsh (Kyle Hillard), David Hemblen (Dr J. Fromberg)
Plot: Teenage horror fan Michael Brower gets a copy of the latest computer game ‘Brainscan’, which purports to be the ultimate in horror. In the game’s virtual world he is to play a killer, enter a house, stab a sleeping man and cut the man’s foot off as a souvenir. But afterwards Michael is shocked to learn of a local murder being reported on the news just the same way that he conducted it and to then find the severed foot in his fridge. A gaudy figure calling itself Trickster emerges out of the game, taunting Michael that he did the killing and challenging him to carry on and complete the game. But even when Michael tries to destroy the game, Trickster refuses to let him and demands that he conduct further acts of murder, including those of his best friend and the girl next door.
Just when you groaned and wondered if there was ever going to be such a thing as a decent or even moderately intelligent Virtual Reality or videogame movie, along comes Brainscan. Its VR-become-reality scenario is no more credible than any of the other similar efforts out there – indeed there is quite a similarity between Brainscan and the cheap Arcade (1994), which came out around the same time – but it is made with a little more care than most of the other efforts. Its premise, if not exactly believable, gives the impression of at least having been thought out (although the ending is annoyingly cliched).
Edward Furlong, fresh from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) gives a good performance and his travails in Virtual Reality are well done. The game effects are somewhat on the cheap side and the scene where Trickster absorbs Edward Furlong is not believable as anything other than a cute optical. The film does root itself in horror fandom – copies of Fangoria magazine keep popping up throughout. Although ironically, despite standing up for horror and against censorship, the film does take amusingly literally the view that horror in the media does cause kids to go out and kill.
The script for Brainscan was one of the early works of screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker who would go on the next year to write the amazing serial killer thriller Se7en (1995) and other genre works such as Hideaway (1995), 8MM (1999) and Sleepy Hollow (1999).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1996
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