Brain Damage

Escaping from a nice old Jewish couple unwilling to cater for his unusual dietary needs, the phallic Elmer, a parasitic creature, fastens on to Brian (Herbst) as a more promising victim. By tapping into the back of Brian's neck, Elmer blue-rinses his brain with a euphoria-inducing liquid. Brian thinks he can handle it, but it's addictive, and pretty soon he's helping Elmer to obtain his preferred food, human brains. While it would win few prizes for narrative sophistication and visual imagination - the euphoric hallucinations seem to have strayed from a '60s LSD movie - Brain Damage does display a commendable social conscience in deploring the perils of mindbending substances. By way of aversion therapy, it presents gruesome scenes like that in which Brian pulls a bloody string of mental floss from out of his left ear. Similarly, the most disgusting scene will deter impressionable young women from performing the act of fellatio for life. There are some nice comic moments though; in fact relying as heavily on its disquieting black humour as on images of physical disgust, the whole thing works far better as comedy than horror.