Twisted Brain aka Horror High

And now for one of the quintessential 70s Doom films, one that's haunted many a young child's  nightmares...at least, anybody who was young and tuned in to late night TV in the 1970s. I saw this movie under its TV title, "Twisted Brain", which sounds much more menacing. The title "Horror High" was almost affectionate in the way it conjures up hoary horror cliches, but "Twisted Brain", that sounds downright disgusting. The TV print had the gore almost completely edited out, and perhaps even worse, contained a dull dramatic interlude that had nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Nevertheless, the print known as "Twisted Brain" was the one most of us saw, until recently when the film was finally released in its original form.

Vernon is the typical high school horror movie nerd, the kind of student that even Carrie White would beat up. The mean jocks that terrorize Vernon call him "The Creeper", and even Vernon's teachers seem to want to antagonize him in whatever way that will hurt him the most. His English teacher determines that Vernon's poor grades in her class stem from his obsession with chemistry, so she shreds his "chemistry report" with her paper cutter. His gym teacher strongarms Vernon into helping his dumb football players cheat on their work by copying Vernon's answers on tests. What none of them know is that Vernon's lab experiment involves creating a formula that turns his gentle white guinea pig into a dark-furred, raging guinea-beast. Before long, Vernon is taking the stuff himself, at which point he transforms into a homicidal alter-ego with extra body hair in all the wrong places. 

"Horror High" may actually be the more appropriate title after all, because it's so illogical that it appears to have been written under the influence of a recreational drug which was by all accounts surging in popularity in 1974. The script is so campy that it almost seems like a spoof, although it's played straight most of the time, a rickety framework for a series of far-out set pieces. All I can tell you is, it didn't matter to me when I was 8 years old. The bloody body of the janitor's dead cat--as well as the hideously melted face of the janitor himself after Vernon plunges him into a vat of acid--remain burned into my brain as the stuff of bad dreams. Ditto for a moment when someone ends up on the wrong end of a paper cutter (hint: didn't I already mention a paper cutter before in this review?). The director goes for a lot of weird angles in his framing, and the terror scenes make use of colored lighting that gives the movie a comic book feel. 

Cult film fans rejoice, because this movie's got a few luminaries. There's one single person in the entire school that likes Vernon, and it's Rosie Holotik, from "Don't Look in the Basement!". So why is Vernon acting so whiny all the time? Any groovy 70s guy would have loved to have Rosie Holotik treat him like a sex object. Austin Stoker plays the lone detective assigned to this serial killer operating inside a high school. Everyone knows Stoker from "Assault on Precinct 13", but you really have to see him in the mind blowing exorcism-blaxploitation classick "Abby" to truly recognize his full cult film cred. Here in "Horror High", he has the difficult task of playing it straight in a movie that is clearly off the deep end in silliness. It also must be said that Pat Cardi carries the film rather nicely as Vernon; looking a lot like I imagine Marilyn Manson looked in his high school years, Cardi's performance is appealingly oddball. Some of the otherwise unmentioned performances are just plain awful. 


Make no mistake, "Horror High" is total 70s doom. The music score is an eerie prog-rock sounding thing; it's more Alice Cooper than Goblin, and it's not nearly as prevalent as it should have been in the finished product. There's even a spooky, folky ballad theme song, a hallmark of the 70s Doom genre! And woooo....it even has Vernon's name in it. I can't recommend "Horror High" enough to fans of the weird. If you haven't seen it yet, you absolutely NEED to, or...I dunno, the world will implode or something.  (Groovy Doom)