The Most Bizarre Horror Movie. Ever.
The title is a quote from the cover of Casanegra's DVD cover for "Brainiac" (US title-in Mexico, it went by, "El Baron Del Terror"), and I would have to say that this cult classic of Mexican horror comes pretty darn close to living up to that pronouncement.
For many fans, Brainiac over the past fifty-so years has meant over the top, tongue-in-cheek horror, much on the same level as Same Raimi achieved with his Evil Dead films a quarter of a century later. There has always been a fringe group that thought "Brainiac" was unintentional humor on the part of producer, star Abel Salizar, and director Chano Urueta, however, both men and the production crew they worked with had already achieved great success producing "straight horror" films before "Brainiac", strengthening the belief for the rest of us that all that craziness was intensional. A spoof in a very comic-book fashion on the very horror medium that Mexican cinema excelled at.
If you take the time to watch other classic horror films from Mexico in the same time period, films like "The Witch's Mirror", "The Vampire" and its sequel, "The Vampire's Coffin", "The Curse of the Crying Woman", and "The Black Pit of Dr. M", then you'll see talented artists creating atmospheric black-and-white horror every bit as entertaining and frightening as their Univeral Horror film counterparts. These "serious" horror films were produced by polished craftsmen who knew how to make creepy, gothic horror and science-fiction for a public starving for it; and not just in Mexico; many of these titles were dubbed and released in the United States to an appreciative audiece
"Brainiac" stands out among its fans as a giddy, tasteless (see Salizar spoon chilled brains into his hungry mouth), campy, tongue-in-cheek romp, with just enough fright mixed in, paying homage to all the horror/sci-fi films to precede it, in a style that stands out in bizzare contradiction to the horror films preceeding it. Go ahead and join the rest of us for revenge, twisted humor, creepy murders, and campy horror at the foggy Mexican estate of Baron. I hear they're serving chilled brains and fine wine.Read full review
