Obnoxious American CEO, William Cole (Bruce Campbell), travels to Bulgaria to invest in a subway. When he is murdered, along with his ex-KGB cab driver, Yegor, a mad scientist (Stacy Keach) and his assistant (Ted Raimi) resurrect him, using parts of the cab driver’s brain to repair Cole’s. When Cole’s wife is also murdered, the scientist puts her brain into a handy robot. Both Cole/Yegor and his robot wife escape from the scientist in order to search for their killer.
I like Bruce Campbell (as an actor, we’ve never had martinis at the club so I can’t say anything more than that). I’ve been waiting a long time, since Army of Darkness, for a film to use his talents, his charisma, and gift with comedy…and I’m going to go right on waiting. Someone needs to design a film for this man, and that someone should not be Bruce Campbell.
Campbell has been trying to make Man with the Screaming Brain for 19 years. Why? For the love of God, why? With credits as writer, director, producer and star, Campbell is responsible for what’s on the screen. Sure, the obviously too-low budget is beyond his control, so the Sci-Fi channel, which supplied both funding and the ill-considered requirement that they shoot in Bulgaria, gets a bit of the blame, but this was Campbell’s mutant baby. It didn’t need better care; it needed to be stillborn.
For a zany send-up of ’50s B-movies, it’s not very zany. In the first half hour, nothing funny or absurd happens at all. Instead, we get cab rides. We get Cole deriding socialism (which ends up going nowhere; odd considering how much time is spent in these political diatribes). We get Cole unsuccessfully hitting on a gypsy girl. We get the ignored wife hitting on the cab driving. This isn’t a sci-fi comedy; it’s a soap opera.
Finally, Cole dies and the comedy goes into…well…maybe first gear. Campbell does a few nice slapstick routines as Cole fights with Yegor for control of their brain, but nothing he didn’t do better in Evil Dead II. We also get Ted Raimi rapping in a faux-Bulgarian accent, which is even less humorous than it sounds (assuming you think it sounds painful).
In the end, Man with the Screaming Brain becomes a blandly directed rip-off of several Steve Martin movies (and why would anyone, ever, want to rip off Steve Martin movies?). Primarily, it’s a poorly done version of All of Me. I’d always considered All of Me to be the poorly done version of All of Me, but live and learn.
Like so many others, I was hoping for a twisted, edgy, cult comedy. Instead, I watched a conventional, predictable film that manages silly, but never funny. Back to waiting.