Unburied Trailers: Brain Damage (1988)

Horrorific content by penguin_pete on October 27th, 2018 | Trailers, Videos |

Welcome to our continued series: “Unburied” ! Each week, we’re going to select one horror movie trailer from a forgotten weird movie and dig it up so you can play with the bones. And just look what crawled out of the crypt this week!

For your last weekend before Halloween, cancel your plans, replace your viewing queue, and do not allow any distraction to deter you from viewing and deeply appreciating 1988‘s Brain Damage. Not only is this trailer wacky, but it’s just a tiny taste of this sick, demented, cheeseball masterpiece. By all means, get the uncut version, in the highest quality format you can manage, because it’s worth it!

Never heard of this movie? Most people haven’t, but odds are good you know its creator, Frank Henenlotter, from the Basket Case franchise. Basket Case has a thriving cult following and is recognized as a canonical midnight movie, but strangely enough, Brain Damage doesn’t have nearly the notoriety despite being one of Henenlotter’s better works, certainly his best budget. Granted, it's got a few flaws, but between the vintage stop-motion animation, silky smooth voice work courtesy of an uncredited John Zacherle, and overall '80s craziness, this movie works perfectly as an EC Comics horror story come to crackling life, and we wouldn't change a thing.

It got overlooked out of the competition for the list of weirdest movies over at 366Weird, with one stinking paragraph. TVTropes has a skeleton entry . It just seems permanently stuck in the shadow of Basket Case, when it should at least be seen as its peer. Has its parable of drug addiction not grown more relevant with every passing decade?

We’ll toss you a bonus clip just to get you hooked. “Just listen to the light!”