Science Crazed (1991)

 

Director: Ron Switzer

Screenplay: Ron Switzer

Cast: Cameron Scholes; Tony Della Ventura as The 'Fiend'; Robin Hartsell

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #169  /An Abstract Film Candidate

 

I Suggest nerve gas tests in the following countries...[Long pause] France...[Even longer pause]...Canada...

 

For where did this Canadian SOV film come from? Chronologically even Science Crazed's date of birth is confusion. Some say 1991, others 1989 thus making it a film from the year of my birth, and I have belief it was at least shot in 1987 or around that period, due to a Toronto telephone directory book and how, with all the horror posters on the walls, some like Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Creepshow 2 (1987) time stamp the period.

What cannot be denied that, between this and Things (1989), Canada in its dips into shot-on-video cinema could get weird, and the notoriety of this film is immediately established when you notice how everything is s-l-o-w. Not Leonardo DiCaprio reduced to a bag of meat crawling to his car due to out-of-date Quaaludes, nor even slow minimalist cinema, but a perplexing one-off form of minimalism. Half suspecting, with a shot of a book on Hegel on the left and a horror book on the right of the table, this was made on purpose like this at times, and at other times clearly by accident and by an unknown psychological influence, Science Crazed takes a very simple premise and runs it into a form of ultra minimalism. A mad doctor wishes to experiment on a willing subject, a woman with blue fingernails, having created a serum to cause pregnancy and birth in very little time, only for the procedure to kill the mother and a fully matured adult son to wander off.

Said son, looking like Marlon Brandon in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) after a horrifying shaving accident that leaves his entire head covered in gauze and bloody, does not scream "Sheila!" in the middle of a rainy night, but makes insanely deep breathing noises (especially in how they are mixed on the soundtrack) and drags himself along with a lame leg. Anyone, anyone, he encounters he chokes and kills in his random path in a building complex which is a stand in for a lab and a variety of environments.

It is a film set in its own world of logic due to budgetary restrictions - when the cocky cop is called at a Video Shed rental store, looking at a Rambo VHS tape, and takes the call as if at a police station whilst the clerk makes funny faces during the conversation. Science Crazed, to those who know of this, is known for how extreme in its sedate nature it is, even the dialogue and how it is spoken in an insanely drawn out narcolepsy complicated further as it was post dubbed. And of course, the film places its gonads on the table by how extreme this gets through a ten minute exercise sequence. It is what this sentence suggests - two woman, one in a pink tutu whilst the other in a form fitting piece, who the camera crudely zooms in on from behind when she is leant over without tact, exercising in-between shots of the monster limping along in a corridor for what does last ten minutes of running time. Maybe because I was prepared for this notorious sequence, it did not beat me down, and was amusing instead, but it is literally the scene that makes or breaks a viewer's experience because it early on in the production. It warns you how more random, and how prolonged and dragged out, the film will get.

It is abstract? Science Crazed did eventually ware me down into a daze, as in terms of a plot, it is barely one baring the detective and the doctor's assistances tracking the beast down. The production feels improvised but in a peculiar way as a result. You can struggle in padding out a film, as has been found in micro-budget genre cinema, but how does one explain the scene where a woman, behind a desk, says extremely slowly with length pauses names of countries to start nerve gas tests in, which is never explained or elaborated upon, baring that it is the definition of random improvisation?

The film in its final act, by the time the fiend has terrorised an indoor swimming pool, does feel the burden of its weight, at least for myself when I felt myself drifting off into the visuals. Ultimately, in-between this and Things (1989), Things is so consistently strange that you do keep alert once you understand its logic. Science Crazed in its own way is just as fascinating, but as much of its reputation stems from the fact that large portions of the film are repetition of shots, of the fiend limping along or watching bystanders at the swimming pool, which are stretched out to an extreme. Not a lot actually happens in terms of a film, one which could have been less the sixty minutes or shorter, and as a result it is closer to a monster film distorted beyond recognition that acts like an endurance test in pacing. Even for a horror fan, there is not a lot of the luridness of gore either and any practical effects, barring some fake blood, with a lot of the film following an old b-movie trope of a monster strangling a person which is very easy to act out, usually a sign of a terrible horror film.

Here that is less of an issue, as a film this openly hostile to a conventional viewing experience is in itself strange and unconventional, which is ultimately why it has developed the reputation over a decade it has. It is abstract though? I would argue this could have gone further - as it Michael Snow, the Canadian avant-garde film maker, or a slow cinema director had helmed a b-movie horror film but kept in Bela Tarr length long takes and shot from a distance the exercise sequence, in a one take ten minute sequence, in real time before a monster killed the participants. This is something else, and part of its legacy as an obscure oddity, which is the entire micro-budget genre where some due to their form and budgetary restrictions leads to perplexing distortions in audio-visual content. Many which, frankly, most people would not find appealing in the slightest; however for someone like me, whether shot on videotape camera or a digital one from the early 2000s, with just limited resources they seem to exist in their own little worlds with their own rules that are compelling to witness and their own form of abstraction. That the film promised a sequel in the end credits, the "Revenge of the "Fiend"" is almost a cherry on top to this particular example. That, with its director having disappeared entirely, it is the ultimate what-if mystery of what the blue hell a sequel to Science Crazed would have turned out like if he kept making films.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist/Psychotronic/Random/Slow

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium