So there I was last night, after spending a delightful dinner with friends, still not sleepy enough to go to bed (unlike my lovely wife) and looking for something to do.  Fortunately I’ve saved up a number of craptastic films for such an ocassion, and with my eyes closed and hands outstretched I went and picked out a piece of craptastic cinema from 1992 – Bruce Campbell’s Mindwarp AKA Brain Slasher.)

It’s basically Evil Dead but on a post apocalyptic Earth with mutants rather than zombies.  The hilarious thing is that the movie is basically played straight by all the actors involved.  I mean, there’s a bit of over-acting from Angus Scrimm (you know the "Tall Man" from the Phantasm films) who plays the baddie.  But mostly, everyone seems to be taking the film deadly seriously.  Even Bruce seems a bit subdued at times.

It’s basically about Judy played by the very nice to look at Marta Alicia (in what, according to IMDB seems to be her only ever acting role) who, like the rest of humanity, is plugged into a Virtual Reality system where she can live her greatest fantasy (she visited other planets and climbed mountains, or something).  Anyway, Judy gets a bit bored and decides she wants to experience the outside world.  Shenanigans ensue and the next thing you know she’s running away from cannibals only to be rescued by Bruce… sorry, Stover.  There’s some very quick bonding between the two, that leads to some shagging (and one of the weakest sex scenes ever… I mean I wanted boobies but was robbed!) and the both of them are kidnapped by the mutant cannibals leading to much violence and gore and the drinking of blood.

Bruce is fine in the role.  He gets to smash up mutants, save the girl and go a bit nuts – but without the snappy one liners that I was sort of expecting. On the other hand I’m not that stunned that Marta Alicia never acted again.  She looks nice and has got some decent musculature, but in the acting stakes she’s a bit rubbish.  It’s not helped that she playing her lines as straight as a virgin in a brothel.

The last twenty minutes are a bit bonkers with an ending that makes no sense.  The twist is so hackneyed and crap that it makes your eyes water.  Also, the message of the film seems to be that it’s better to live your life trapped in VR then to try and survivie the harshness of the real world.  Which I thought was an odd thematic choice.  But there you go.

Bruce would end up meeting Ida Gearon on the film set (she was the costume designer) and marrying her.  The director, Steve Barnett, would end up being  director on Scanner Cop 2 (a classic of the Scanner Cop genre… and I should review one of these days).  And the writers, John D Brancato and MIchael Ferris, would go on to writer Terminator 4: Salvation (and Terminator 3 as well).   So it’s good to see that they’re still knocking out quality work.

The film isn’t bad enough to be included in the pantheon of craptastic films.  The production values are quite high.  The directing isn’t too bad and the acting just about passes broadcastable muster.  That said, the ending nearly tips it over the line.  But it is mildly entertaining and did a decent job at keeping me awake, while also not exciting too much so that I wasn’t sleepy after the film – if you know what I mean.  So if you have it lying around and have a dead 90 minutes to fill, Mindwarp’s not the worst way to fill it.