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)  /An Abstract Film Candidate

 

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

 

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 micro-budget cinema could get weird, Science Crazed one of those true oddities from this world with the added strangeness of disembodied voices, strange pacing and random tangents.

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when you notice how everything is s-l-o-w. Not Leonardo DiCaprio reduced to a bag of meat crawling to his car due to out-of-date Quaaludes as in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), nor even slow minimalist cinema, but a perplexing one-off form of minimalism.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. The opening is full of pregnant pauses, as a doctor researching a serum that causes quick pregnancies is told by the board funding him to stop the research, represented by one man. Both have dubbed over post-synch voices. The doctor, rocking sunglasses, still continues the experiment with a willing female subject where, in exactly three hours, she will become pregnant, and in twenty one hours, give birth. The unfortunate issue of a bloody aftermath transpires where the woman dies, and the male and female assistants have to cover up the incident whilst keeping the baby. Said baby gestates, rapidly, into a full grown man with a bloody bandaged head, elf ears, a bloodied white shirt and jeans, and a taste for strangling random people to death including the doctor himself, unhappy about his existence.

Science Crazed takes a very simple premise and runs it into a form of ultra minimalism. Said son, looking like Marlon Brandon in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) after a horrifying shaving accident, making insanely deep breathing noises (especially in how they are mixed on the soundtrack among the disembodied and repeated synth) and drags himself along with a lame leg. Anyone, anyone, he encounters he chokes, sometimes with one hand, and kills in his random path in a building complex which is a stand in for a lab and a variety of environments. Science Crazed for those who know it is notorious for its strange narcoleptic tone, the set up a traditional one for any horror, only to drift off between the VHS hiss silence between music strings. It is a film set in its own world of logic due to budgetary restrictions - when the cocky detective 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. 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, 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 does eventually ware you down into a daze, as in terms of a plot, it is barely one baring the detective and the doctor's assistances tracking the Fiend 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? Or the prolonged scene that does make sense in context, but lingers, of a woman approaching the Fiend calmly in a room with silhouettes drawn on the white wall, caressing the heavily breathing monster for a prolonged moment, avant garde film levels in pace, all for a backbreaking bear hug as a receipt? Or the other woman with a very Canadian accent, as the camera spins around her in the dark, speaking to herself (without sound) in prayer despite looking like an eighties day glow punkette? The accidental minimalism of this monster film is its own strange experience.

The film in its final act, by the time the fiend has terrorised an indoor swimming pool with wooden panelling, does feel the burden of its weight if you cannot engage with its tone, as liable as it did when I first saw the film to cause the viewer to drift off into the visuals. Ultimately, between this and Things, 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 in terms of being a film that is a 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. 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, sometimes with one hand, which is very easy to act out but for most people is usually a sign of a terrible horror film. It is an acquired taste.

As a film openly hostile to a conventional viewing experience, this is in itself strange and unconventional, which is, ultimately, why it has developed the reputation over a decade it has. It is abstract though? There are as potentially strange concoctions done on purpose you could imagine - if 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. One can imagine, shot from a distance the exercise sequence, in a one take ten minute sequence, in real time before a monster killed the participants, and whilst not for everyone, that would have been memorable in the annuals of horror cinema in itself. Science Crazed itself, for all the moments clearly intentional in structure, is not intentional at other times, and thus 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 as much as ones which fully succeed. Many, 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