Certain films conjure up their writer’s room with their first frame. Phosphorescent Funyun bags littering all available surfaces. The sound of a smart-guy rock album like Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy A Thrill? (1972) or the newest Ben Folds Five record blaring on the tape deck. Your bare toes on the crusty shag-pile carpet. A three-figure bong—the quiet engine of the creative process—out of view but entirely perceptible.
This is, at least, my own vision of the writer’s room that produced Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996), a movie with a pathologically high bit-per-minute rate. The taxi driver who narrates the only film to date made by the eponymous Canadian comedy quintet isn’t just a regular taxi driver, he also has a way with profanities and an indeterminable accent that’s Chicano on the front end but has a Balkan aftertaste. Then, there is Wally Terzinsky (Scott Thompson, who plays eight different roles in the film), the closeted father of two who masturbates to gay porn upstairs while his kids hang their heads in the living room. Thompson’s facial expressions—pleasure, panic, ecstasy—recall the waxen melodrama of Mr. Potato Head, a face that always tells you exactly what it means. All the signs point to the film being a slightly edgier Austin Powers.
But it’s a little more complicated than that. Brain Candy’s world is actually not all that far from ours; it also bends to the pressures of the pharmaceutical industry. In the film, Dr. Chris Cooper (Kevin McDonald) prematurely launches GLeeMONEX, an “anti-depression tablet,” after failing to produce a Christmas drug and a back-to-school drug in time for the market’s demands. GLeeMONEX makes the user recall the happiest moment from their lives and then latches onto that feeling permanently. “It’s like 72 degrees in your head… every day,” proclaims the drug’s geriatric guinea pig Mrs. Hurdicure (Thompson again) with a heavenward look, inadvertently giving GLeeMONEX its new slogan.
Brain Candy’s critique of pharmaceuticals is solidly grounded in our world. The film points a Nerf gun at big pharma, the perils of sexual identity, something the movie dubs “toast-fucking,” and much more. The film has aged like a stick of string cheese forgotten in a refrigerator for too long; some may not appreciate the funk it has acquired over time. People who do not appreciate it can stay at home, cast in amber by their prescription pill of choice. This is a movie for those who know “life is short, life is shit, and soon it will all be over.”
Brain Candy screens Friday, March 8, at The Vogue as part of “The Friday Night Special Film Series.”
