Brainscan (1994)

Spooktober Challenge 2025

Premise: Edward Furlong is a weird, lonely teen that’s a bit too much into horror movies and video games.
I’ll give you a second to feel smug about the obvious joke here.

Anyway, so he finds Brainscan, an ultra-realistic for 1994 game that… summons a very spooooooky and eeeevil entity, The Trickster. And uhm, then people dying in the game die in real life and yeah, it’s that kind of movie.
Under 90 minutes? a bit over five minutes more than that.
Do they say the title? Sure.

One sentence review: In case you were wondering “how come Edward Furlong didn’t become a superstar after Terminator 2?”
Okay, more: Oof, this is not great. Like, sure, you can laff at how dated and extremely mid90s this is (there’s even a White Zombie song in the soundtrack!) but even though I can find that funny the movie is clearly trying to… I don’t know. It feels like they really thought “we have the next Frederic Krueger here!” and uhm, I’m sorry but the Trickster is a bit too silly.
A simple way to improve it: All that said I won’t lie: I love anytime an extremely vhs movie like this one tries to give you FUTURISTIC, ULTRAREALISTIC games and in that sense it delivers. I’d have loved if we got more of that dumb crap.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

Michael’s area code is 717 which is located in Eastern Pennsylvania. However if you look closely at the letters that he sorts through and finds the Brainscan package, the state that he lives in is actually New Jersey.