There's a term in this business called "burying the lede" for when you downplay the most interesting part of your story in favor of other facts. A real-life example would be if we went out on a date and I talked about yarn for two hours before mentioning I could knit you a fully functional private jet/kitten.
See, you've got to play to your strengths (this is why I never go anywhere with a shirt on). If you've got a movie about two brains in the same skull like 2005's Man with the Screaming Brain, why would you wait longer than five seconds to get that on the screen?
On business in Bulgaria, Bruce Campbell is killed by Tamara Gorski, who also takes out Campbell's wife Antoinette Byron and her own ex-fiancee Vladimir Kolev. Before their bodies are cold, a local scientist combines Campbell and Kolev's brains and puts Byron's in a robot body, giving them a chance for revenge on the murderous Gorski.
This makes Man with the Screaming Brain sound so great we should all be watching it until we starve on our couches and our dogs stare at us with an expression that starts out sad in only that way dogs can look before becoming hungry in only that way wolves can look, but I'm performing some editorial sorcery here. Sadly, the brain-merging radness doesn't appear for almost an hour.
Until that wonderful time, we're subjected to cheesy, melodramatic dialogue that doesn't even have the common courtesy to be funny. The bargain-rate action scenes are a little better, with the endearingly clumsy choreography of your backyard wrestling tapes.
In fact, other than Gorski's psychotic and barely motivated murders, you could safely skip Screaming Brain's first 60 minutes. You wouldn't want to miss its last 30.
That's when Campbell (who also wrote and directed) puts his considerable physical comedy skills on display. Dressed like a Jersey clubber, forehead lined with stitches that make him look like Surgery Pope or an unhygienic Klingon, Campbell's fight with Kolev for control over his body is slapstick brilliance. Meanwhile, whoever's doing the acting for the robot deserves a robot Oscar, which is like a human Oscar that also transforms into a tiny gold Corvette.
If the whole movie had been like that, we'd have one winner of a B-movie, if a silly and spastic one. But the setup stretches on twice as long as it needs to without providing any entertainment. Man with the Screaming Brain eventually delivers for fans of Campbell and crazy brain-swapping, it just squanders its chance to do anything else.
