Seduced by the Juice: The Addictive Appeal of Brain Damage

You'll know whether Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage is for you within the first few minutes. An old man returns home with a bag full of wet brains while his wife preps one like a cornish game hen to feed to Aylmer, some sort of creature that lives in their bathtub. Unfortunately, Aylmer has disappeared, and the elderly couple have a complete meltdown, smashing plates, ripping books off the shelf, and knocking over tribal art as they look for him. It's so over the top that it's silly, but at the same time, you want to know what this thing is and where it's gone just as much (well, nearly as much) as they do.

Both questions get answered shortly when Brian (Rick Hearst) blows off a date with his girlfriend to sleep off a sudden sickness. As it turns out, the sickness is caused by Aylmer, an unbelievably phallic worm creature that shoots hallucinogenic blue juice into people's brain stem to get them hooked enough to carry him around, keep him hydrated, and help him murder people for their brains. Brian agrees, and so do you, if you've watched this far. The movie's lit like a cemetery at midnight, a blue filter making everything look cold and dreary. A box of Frosted Flakes on the refrigerator looks more like one of the signs from They Live than a cheery cereal. Here's a talking worm that sounds like Frasier Crane that can make this world more colorful—Brian wants his juice, of course. So do we.

The juice, pardon the pun, juices up the movie, pushing Brian away from his dowdy girlfriend and weirdly-leering brother and into a punk club, a junkyard, and a shower with a bodybuilding hunk that can't stop washing one pec in particular. Brian's brain is electrified by the possibilities of the colors, the music, the emotions that the juice brings, and so is the movie. It is, quite frankly, more fun being on the juice than spending time in Brain Damage's world without. But don't confuse the relative mundanity of Henenlotter's non-juiced scenes with a lack of effort. The repeated scenes of Brian getting rid of his blood-stained clothes in an alleyway creates a cramped claustrophobia, as if he's trapped in the sets that the film built. A trip to a seedy hotel features a room with such bad vibes that David Lynch would be envious. This is not a film made without thought, regardless of the low budget and cheesy concept.

And there's a pleasing low-budget nastiness to the film, as jokes loop so far back around that they don't even become jokes anymore. A scene where Brian moans against a wall as Aylmer injects his juice while a hobo in the foreground weeps while drinking alcohol takes subtext and pushes it into text. Aylmer bursting out of Brian's pants to suck out a woman's brain while she attempts to suck out, uh… "Brian's juice" takes text and turns it into supertext. What is Brain Damage about, actually? Addiction, sexual awakening… Sure, but it pushes its metaphors so deeply and clearly that the actual meaning loops back around into thoughtful ambiguity. Repeat your own name long enough and it becomes gibberish, a riddle that you can't begin to solve. What is Brain Damage about? It declares its meaning, again and again, to the point that you begin to question whether it has any meaning at all. Does it? Maybe some juice would help you solve that riddle, or at least make thinking about it more fun.