By the 2000s, Campbell had seemingly accepted that any potential leap towards a-movie stardom had probably passed him by. Instead, he began to appear in a sequence of increasingly bizarre low-budget indie movies such as Alien Apocalypse and, most brilliantly, Man With The Screaming Brain. While Alien Apocalypse is a fairly generic extra-terrestrial science-fiction b-movie, Man With The Screaming Brain is actually a pretty funny (albeit very convoluted) sci-fi comedy starring Campbell as WIlliam Cole. Cole, a wealthy American CEO, travels to Bulgaria to expand his business - but his anti-Communist ranting doesn't go down well with the locals. Essentially, to sum up a strange sequence of events, both Cole and a local taxi driver named Yegor wind up "dead". Dr. Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov (OK, I did say pretty funny. Not VERY funny.) kidnaps Cole and experiments on his brain, splicing it with that of Yegor. For the remainder of the film, Bruce Campbell plays Cole AND Yegor, with both men interacting in his spliced brain and seeking revenge on those that killed them. Campbell is excellent in this film, making the most of a fairly ridiculous story and actually delivering a humorous and multi-faceted performance that outshines its relatively modest surroundings. Oh, and the prosthetic scar that runs down his forehead is actually a pretty cool image.
