We watched The Brain first, it's a 1988 movie that I hadn't remembered seeing. I looked when I got home and there's a listing on my Watched Movie List that says I watched a movie with the same name in 1990. Trouble is there's an earlier movie with the same name and it could be that movie. I didn't make any notes on the listing and my Week-At-Glance diary listing has no details for that day. Not that it matters, lets move on, I've already wasted enough time thinking about it. The Brain is written by Barry Pearson and directed by Edward Hunt. Haven't seen any of the other work they've done, probably won't at this stage.
The story is about David Gale, playing a scientist, who's got an alien organism that resembles a giant Brain in his lab. It's a dick of a brain and it eats people. David has a TV show that secretly uses the airwaves to take over the local's brains. Lucky for the rest of us the show is a local show, for local people. Oh, wait, it's planning to go national and then global. Not all the people receiving the transmissions wind up under the influence of the Brain. The transmissions affect their brains and some of the victims slip over the deep end and start killing.
Our hero is a knob named Jim, he gets in trouble at the start of the movie for tossing a brick of sodium into the toilet. It reacts and the water sprays out of the sinks and toilets. He's laughing until they come down hard on his ass. The whole sodium scene was kind of annoying, it's there to set up sodium, it will be important later. There are many times when the movie refers to Sodium, signs on walls especially, you could almost have a drinking game with the movie. Every time sodium popped up, anywhere, you have a drink. You'd be on your ass before the end credits. That's the Brain below. It gets out of it's tank and moves about. People are tasty sweaty snacks to it.
Harping back on that sodium sequence with Jim, the film makers want to get him caught for the prank. Not sure why, they make him out to be a dick, what's up with that? Annoying characters aren't my favs. Even with some annoying writing I didn't think it was a bad movie, just average. I don't know that I need to go buy that new Blu-ray, it was only released on April 30 and the thing is gone from Amazon. Luckily I downloaded a copy off of YouTube a couple of years ago. I never got around to watching it.
Shadow Builder is a 1998 horror film that was based on a Bram Stoker story that I never read. I read the novel Dracula 40 or so years ago, after Chester Cuthbert recommended it to me. That's where I got a copy from, I pretty sure I don't have it anymore, I got rid of so many books over the years. So many weren't ones I wanted to reread and there's always a shortage of room no matter where I hang my hat.
Shadow Builder is directed by Jamie Dixon, he's mostly a special effects supervisor with 70 credits in the last 29 years. SB was his first film, his second was Bats: Human Harvest in 2007. I liked B:HH but it wasn't quite as entertaining as SB. Michael Stokes wrote the screenplay.
Michael Rooker plays a priest who kills demons and people involved with demons. He shoots an evil Archbishop in the opening scenes. There's been some sort of ceremony and a man was killed. Michael travels to the man's town to see if he can learn anything. From the local priest he learns that the man had a son. It turns out that the shadow demon is after that kid. Things go downhill in the town once the shadow demon starts killing. He gains power from the killings and he needs a bit of power to do what he needs to do with the kid.
There's plenty of running about and lots of yelling. The gore and effects are fairly good. The story works well enough. I liked Michael Rooker and Tony Todd. Tony plays the local crazy person. All in all I liked the movie and would watch it again someday.