KIDS IN THE HALL: BRAIN CANDY
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1996) **1/2 (out of four)
For a span of two weeks or so when I was in ninth grade, "Kids in the Hall" was my favorite show. I watched edited rerun after edited rerun of the sketch comedy show on Comedy Central until I started to see the same episodes over and over again. Eventually, I got sick of it all and moved on, returning a few years later to see reruns of the next few season's worth of episodes. By that point, "Kids in the Hall" had gone down the tubes like crap through a goose and I wondered what I ever saw in that show in the first place, but I still felt obligated to watch and review the feature-length movie it spawned, just as I will when the "Beavis and Butt-head" movie comes out this Christmas.
For those of you who have never seen the show on HBO, Comedy Central or your local CBS affiliate at two in the morning, "Kids in the Hall" is a thirty minute sketch comedy show written by and starring David Foley ("Newsradio"), Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney (now on "SNL"), Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson. Basically a western hemisphere version of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," the sketches range from funny and bizarre to vulgar and indecipherable, with most female parts played by the Kids in drag. The show, even during its best, early years, was a mixed bag of entertainment.
The movie BRAIN CANDY is also a mixed bag of entertainment and spans the usual "Kids in the Hall" spectrum of being alternatingly funny, bizarre, vulgar and indecipherable. Like the Python movies HOLY GRAIL and LIFE OF BRIAN, the movie has one thin storyline serving as a setup for the troupe to play a range of male and female characters in different episodic situations. Here, McDonald plays the scientist who invents a wonder drug curing depression by having its patients recall over and over the most pleasant memory of their lives. The evil heads of the company (McKinney and Foley) rush the drug onto the market before sufficient testing can be done on the product and soon everyone is taking the drug.
Some of the early recipients of the drug are an old lady (Thompson) whose happiest memory involves the Christmas her son and his kids came over for a few minutes, a married man (Thompson again) who is in denial about his homosexuality, and a depressed heavy metal star (McCulloch). Some of BRAIN CANDY's best moments come when these characters take the drug for the first time. Thompson's gay character walks down the street, singing a production number to inform the world of his sexual orientation, and McCulloch begins singing folk music about flowers and puppy dogs.
BRAIN CANDY has some great comedic moments but is played a lot more straight (Thompson excepted) than you might think. Many of its scenes toward the last half-hour don't attempt laughs at all but instead achieve a surreal artsy look. The opening credits themselves prepare us for a movie that pays a lot more attention to art design than is customary in the world of sketch comedy. BRAIN CANDY bears little resemblance to the "Kids in the Hall" TV show but is equally or more entertaining.
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