The October Zombie-Thon - Day 16: Insane in the Brain
Posted by Trevor Snyder on 10.16.2008
Apparently describing your mental condition after sitting through this trash.
INSANE IN THE BRAIN (2007)
Written & Directed by: Chad Hendricks
Country: USA
Sigh.
This is gonna be a little shorter of a review than usual, folks. I just don't have it in me to devote a lot of time or energy to today's movie. Because while Insane in the Brain is never quite on the same miserable level as a crap-fest like Zombie Campout, it's still a completely unnecessary waste of time, offering little more to its viewers than frustration and – quite possibly – a massive headache.
There are a lot of reasons a filmmaker chooses to bring his vision to the screen, and that is true even in the zombie genre. Often, directors use the living dead as a means to deliver hard-hitting social commentary. Sometimes, they are simply trying to pay homage to the well-known classics. And, of course, they are frequently just doing nothing more than trying to top every previous zombie film's level of gore. There are certain merits to each of these motivations. Insane in the Brain operates on none of them.
As far as I can tell, this movie exists solely to indulge one lame joke. You see, in the hip-hop world, the word "brain" is sometimes used as a slang-term for oral sex. So, when the zombies in this movie stumble around, crying out for "BRAINS, MORE BRAINSSS," they are not doing so because they have an inhuman desire to feast on people – nope, they've returned from the dead to get blow jobs.
Funny, huh? Well, OK, not really…but it might have been whimsical enough for a two or three-minute short. Unfortunately, writer/director Chad Hendricks has the audacity to stretch this nonsense out for nearly 90 minutes. How, you might ask? Easy – he simply pads most of the running-time with the aforementioned scenes of zombies (here represented by guys wearing Walmart-quality skull masks) wandering around and yelling "BRAINS!" My rough estimate is that these shots account for about 40% of the movie's length, although to any viewer it ends up feeling more like, oh, I don't know…eternity.
The rest of the movie is a lame blaxploitation "tribute," complete with Superfly-esque fashions, dialogue, and the sort of stereotypical characters we've come to expect from that genre. It's not hard to see which blaxploitation flick Hendricks is most trying to emulate here – the movie's official synopsis refers to it as a cross between Night of the Living Dead and Dolemite, and that Rudy Ray Moore classic is even given a brief shout-out. But, believe me, we're a long way from the comic charms of Dolemite (as for the other movie this one is supposedly like, I think it goes without saying that we're a very long way from Night of the Living Dead).
Hendricks apparently believes that all it takes is to dress your actors up in the right clothes and give them some "jive-talking" dialogue, and presto – you have a hilarious send-up of the blaxploitation genre. I guess it never occurred to him to make sure his movie's jokes were actually…you know…funny. I mean, c'mon, fart jokes are almost always the last refuge of any pathetic comedy, but it seems especially pitiful in a zombie flick. But hey, at least there are also lame, borderline-offensive racist jokes, like the revelation that the zombies can be stopped by rubber bullets because black men are "allergic" to condoms. Ugh. The only good news is that you'll likely not notice every single joke missing by a mile, as you'll no doubt quickly lapse into catatonia as a defense mechanism against the constant, mind-numbingly repetitive music in the background.
Man, this one really took it out of me. Even still, I don't want to be too negative. So I'm gonna point out at least one accomplishment. Until now, I never thought you could make a worse comedy about sex-crazed zombies than Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels. But Chad Hendricks has proven me wrong. Way to go, Mr. Hendricks! Keep up the good work. Or don't. Yeah, now that I think about it, I'd prefer that you don't.
