Overly synthetic

Gamers have always searched for the high of an authentic experience but what happens when that experience becomes too authentic for the players own good. That’s the main idea of 1994’s “Brainscan”, a movie that is ironically never as real, urgent, or even scary as it really should be. It would be the first writing assignment for screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”) and it unfortunately comes off like a first draft.

It stars Edward Furlong of “T2”, playing a kid named Michael who lost his mother as a young boy and barely sees his always-traveling father. He pretty much has the house to himself, spending most of his time in a grungy attic littered with monster movie posters, Fangoria magazines, Three Stooges on the television, heavy metal playing, and even a hanging noose around his bed. Most rooms are hardly ever as intriguing to a person’s state of mind as this one is.

He is essentially a hermit, someone drawn to darkness and violence though he doesn’t seem to understand why (we always have a pretty good idea). He also has a really great audio-visual set-up (for the 90’s), which he uses to try out new video games. The latest is Brainscan, a game that supposedly gets so into one’s subconscious that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.

It also offers Michael another chance to be preoccupied with death, as one of the games allows him to commit a murder, stabbing a man several times in what looks like very real and gruesome fashion. Michael must also cover his tracks and hide all evidence in order to win the game. But did it actually happen? The next day Michael is watching the news and who should appear actually dead but his game murder victim.

Complicating matters further is the game’s host named Trickster (T. Ryder Smith) suddenly materializes in Michael’s room. He’s a mohawked psychopath with leathery skin who can spew bile and do all sorts of gross things with his face, ala Beetlejuice. This character is too goofy-looking for terror, but not zany enough for pure lunacy. That he loves the primal thrill of violence kinda makes us think he’s what Michael is in danger of becoming, but even then, the movie is never all that interested in psychology.

“Brainscan” eventually also can’t deliver on the premise of telling what’s real and what’s fake in gaming. It goes on auto-pilot after a while, reducing itself to a bunch of grisly murders which are carried out in such sloppy, apathetic fashion that the whole movie feels like a video game anyway. The lazy cop-out of an ending doesn’t dissuade us of that either.

There’s a perverse spectacle involved with this premise but it eventually just succumbs to horror movie cliches. Even the prerequisite mid credits scene to set up more films in the franchise (which didn’t happen, for good reason) is here and it completely retcons everything we’ve seen beforehand. This is just a silly film. Thankfully Walker got serious a year later with one of the great crime thrillers of all time (“Seven”).