The Man With the Screaming Brain

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): **½

The Man With the Screaming Brain marks B-Movie sensation Bruce Campbell's first attempt at filmmaking (the actor had previously directed several Hercules and Xena episodes but never a feature film), and if it's perhaps not the actor's most triumphant achievement, at least he finally realized a project that, along with producer and pal David M. Goodman, he had been struggling to finance for a little over two decades.

For some of Campbell's fans, Man might be something of a disappointment. This quite wacky film fails to stand up to the camp magnificence of the Evil Dead series, for which the actor is beloved. But the hard-to-wrap-one's-mind-around plot and the confusing, disturbing, and mind-boggling implications it makes, should not be taken lightly. Campbell plays William Cole, a pharmaceutical company CEO who travels all the way to Bulgaria in order to make an investment in an unfinished subway project that will give him a major tax break. He drags his Jackie O-look-alike wife (Antoinette Byron) along with him, thinking that the trip might refresh their dying marriage. Little does he know that they'll be joined by their former-KGB-agent taxi driver Yegor (Vladimir Kolev) and a gypsy woman named Tatoya (Tamara Gorski), to form an unruly quartet.

The overly complex story of how and when it all happens makes it hard to connect with. Suffice it to say that thanks to cuckoo Professor Dr. Ivan Ivanoff (Stacy Keach) and his recent transplant surgery breakthrough, Cole and Yegor, and Jackie and Tatoya, come to literally share the same body and brain respectively. A comment on the possibility of a peaceful co-existence between capitalism and communism? A suggestion that getting married means taming one's wild side? Or perhaps it's all simply an excuse to give Bruce Campbell an opportunity for physical acting.