a review of 脑残

The last time I saw Brain Damage I was still a youngster in the late 1980s, not long after the film's release, so I remembered almost nothing, just that I quite liked it at the time. I revisited the cult horror comedy in 2018, and I still quite liked it. Brain Damage is the delightfully weird, surreal tale of a brain-eating parasite taking control of his hosts by making them addicted to a heavenly drug it produces. Next to the obvious drug dependency metaphors, the phallic shape of the brain parasite and the hallucinations it stirs up also reflect a very uncanny eroticism, reminiscent of David Cronenberg films like Videodrome and Naked Lunch. The trippy musical score really adds to the overall weirdness as well. Brain Damage is both comical and unsettling at the same time. It's campy and low-budget, but also original and intriguing. The caricatural madness and increasingly messed-up state of the lead actor reminded me of Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead film trilogy, and I'd be surprised if Brain Damage wasn't at least partly inspired by the cult classic film The Hidden (1987), starring a young Kyle MacLachlan.