DIRECTED BY: Pat Tremblay
FEATURING: Neil Napier, and amateurs who answered a newspaper ad
PLOT: Pharmaceutical molecules visualized as alien beings travel inside the mind of a
man afflicted with dissociative identity disorder and collect various “personalities,” who are examined as they perform monologues in front of surreal computer generated backgrounds.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not released. But even if it were released, it’s too uneven to qualify for a list of the 366 Best Weird Movies, although it would definitely have a shot at a list of the weirdest movies ever made regardless of quality.
COMMENTS: Before beginning the description of Heads of Control, I must explain why it earns a “beware” rating. Normally, I reserve the “beware” badge for movies that are badly done, or even, in some cases, movies that are morally bad. Heads of Control, however, meets neither of those criteria; although it’s cheap and uneven, it is quite competently mounted and the experimental impulse behind it is admirable. Here, the rating is given due to the simple fact that this movie is so far out, so much like a performance art piece, that will only appeal to a very small slice of the most dedicated avant-gardists, or to those looking for the ultimate micro-budget drug trip film. This experiment requires work on the viewers part to watch, and anyone looking for something remotely resembling a normal narrative movie is going to be hugely disappointed.
With that intriguing warning out of the way, just what is Heads of Control? It begins with the protagonist, Max, being attacked by river zombies; it quickly appears that this is a hallucination, as we see Max in a mental institution being shot up with drugs. Soon, we are inside Max’s diseased brain, watching a pair of hooded creatures. The subordinate journeys into the patient’s psychedelically appointed neurons to fetch various two-dimensional rectangles from his tangled neural networks, which the superior creature places into a floating computer monitor. The pair then watch the results, which consist
Continue reading CAPSULE: HEADS OF CONTROL: THE GORUL BAHEU BRAIN EXPEDITION (2006)