Mindwarp
Judith Apple dreams in colour, but the fantasy is not satisfactory; plugged into the virtual reality of InfiniSynth, she wants more, a purpose to her life which she sees as wasted, the answers to why her father vanished without explanation. Expressing her frustration by entering and disrupting the operatic simulation enjoyed by her mother, something supposedly impossible, the Systems Operator intervenes and throws her not only out of the system but out of the city.
Awakening in a frozen desert, Judy is attacked by mutated figures clad in animal skins but rescued by a man named Stover who recognises her as a “dreamer” from the InWorld; he teaches her how to survive and how to love but they are attacked and captured by the Crawlers and taken to their underground labyrinth where he is forced to scavenge for relics in the remains of the previous civilisation and she is to be presented as breeding stock to the leader of the cannibalistic community, the Seer.
The first film to be produced by Fangoria Films, Mindwarp was released to film festivals in 1992 and was given theatrical release in some territories under the inexplicable name Brain Slasher before moving to home video, a more suitable fit for the material, and now three decades later the sifting of the junk piles has uncovered it, allowing it to be released on Blu-ray by Eureka as part of their classics range.
Directed by Steve Barnett whose resume as a production manager far outweighs his experience helming a feature film, the script is credited to Henry Dominick, a pseudonym for the successful partnership of John Brancato and Michael Ferris whose other credits include technothriller The Net, The Game for David Fincher and two Terminator films, and certainly the premise and the execution of Mindwarp have an unbridged chasm between them, the budget of under a million dollars less than generous even by the standards of the grunge era.
With Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell and Phantasm’s Angus Scrimm headlining as Stover and the Seer and Marta Alicia as Judy, thrown out of her world of carpeted curved walls, personal CD players and data ports in the back of the neck, any attempt to build a complex, layered world of divided classes kept separate and the false promises of blind faith are eschewed in favour of gore, the budget principally spent on the sets, costumes and prosthetics and copious fake blood, the expectations of the target audience of Fangoria readers always the primary concern.
The premise of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank spliced with an ambitious but misguided attempt to recreate Mad Max on a frozen field in Michigan with a tractor as the featured vehicle, the new edition of Mindwarp features roughly shot convention footage of a laconic Campbell and an animated Scrimm discussing the film and other projects and a commentary with former Fangoria editor Tony Timpone which concentrates as much on the magazine as the film.
Mindwarp is available on Blu-ray from Eureka from Monday 22nd February
