Have you ever watched the people who represent us in Washington DC, really pay attention to what they say and do, and wondered just what the heck is wrong with them? The new horror/sci-fi/comedy Brain Dead, from CBS, gives us an answer that Giorgio A. Tsoukalos would be proud of.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) stars as Laurel Healy, a documentary filmmaker who is trying to raise money to finish her newest work, so she takes a job in her brother Luke’s office. Luke (Danny Pino, Scandal) is a U.S. Senator, trying to keep the government from shutting down before the big budget deadline expires.
Tony Shalhoub (Monk) is senator Red Wheatus, holding out for a deal while drinking himself into a stupor. His assistant, Gareth Ritter (Aaron Tveit, Gossip Girl), keeps the senator on his schedule and focused, all the while flirting/not flirting with Laurel.
Into this mix plops a mysterious meteor locked away in a container in the bowels of a government storage facility. government workers are puzzled and concerned by a hole that has been punched through the container (from the inside?), but, when the budget does not pass and the government goes into shutdown mode, the workers are sent home.
And a whole lot of somethings crawl out of the container.
Brain Dead is super fun. It’s a throwback to the kitschy sci-fi/horror flicks of the 1950s, but with a modern political spin. House of Cards meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Maybe not quite that highbrow, but you see what I’m getting at. These teeny tiny little space insect things crawl like ants into someone’s ear, take over their brain (actually pooping out the old brain aurally)(and you haven’t lived until you’ve watched Tony Shalhoub defecating his brain out onto his pillow via his ear canal), and then they make the infected person do…well, it seems to be different for each person. One guy seems to just be very happy and robotically satisfied with his life and marriage (which worries his wife, until she too becomes infected). One man’s head explodes. Senator Wheatus goes from being a drunken cooperating deal-signer, to a wheatgrass-smoothie-swilling hard-nosed über-Republican. And they all start loving the heck out of The Cars’ “You Might Think.”
The writing is a little less goofy or snarky than I’d like to see in a show about brain-eating insects from space, but I really like the show and I want to see where it goes. There are some real moments of emotion, even terror (when the wife is held down by her husband to get infected, well, it was pretty uncomfortable), the acting is terrific from everyone, and the choices made by the director in this pilot episode, particularly his choice of odd camera angles, make this an interesting show to watch just on a visual basis. This show is flat-out fun, and gets a strong recommendation from me.
Check out the trailer below! Monday nights on CBS.
