Disaster Movie – Blu-ray Review

January 19^th, 2009

To Killer Film readers:

Gottlieb Burckhardt, a psychiatrist in 1890, performed an experiment in Switzerland on six patients. He removed the frontal lobes of these patients in small little pieces. While crude, this marked the first entry in the field of psycho surgery, a subset of neurosurgery that helps modulate the performance of the brain (treating mental illness). He claimed to have a 50% success rate, but due to heavy criticism, he had to abandon any further practices. Essentially, this is the first recorded act of a lobotomy procedure in medical history. A lobotomy is defined as a neurosurgery procedure that consists of cutting the connections in the prefrontal cortex (the area that controls and makes decisions, personality expressions, and helps moderate social behavior).

As with all early medical techniques, there’s a trial-and-error stage. But soon an American neurosurgeon Walter Freeman invented the “standard prefrontal lobotomy”, a technique that was redefined and used in every lobotomy since. Their methods involved drilling a hole in the forehead, but it was precise and easy-to-do by trained neurosurgeons.

Much fuss been made over the controversial nature of this procedure. Was it used to actually help the sick and mentally insane? This was the cause of its invention, but it was often criticized for its barbaric nature, something of a stain on the medical advancements in the 20th Century. It’s true though, usually the lobotomy causes a vast change in the personality, far beyond what was hoped or intended.

We’ve learned a lot since those times and about the state of the way the brain works. So, why is the lobotomy procedure still being used today, if we know all of its ramifications? It was a question I had to ask myself, a doctor of 23 years, when the film critic Jon Peters was immediately admitted into Saint Mary’s care on January 15th 2009. We had other questions too, since the lobotomy was used mostly in cases of mental illness or retardation, and here, Jon Peters was a man in fine intellectual health, so why did this procedure happen? Upon questioning the parents of Jon, I found that prior to them finding him; he had been viewing Disaster Movie on Blu Ray. Quickly, it came to me. I had heard about an underground medical clinic, run by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, two men who invented a “visual lobotomy”, a procedure used to destroy the mental health of participants. At first it was successful, their goal was to use this to influence people to keep watching their films. Hopefully, their operation will be shut down forever, and their dastardly cruel procedure will be nothing more than a distant memory.

Let’s have Jon Peters be their last victim. Let’s rally around his noble cause of trying to inform his readers about the good and bad films of the world. His goal was to educate, his love was this site, so let us pray his actions were successful. Jon might not ever be the same again, but his message is crystal clear: Avoid Disaster Movie if you value your life.

Sincerely,

Dr. Alan Smithee, M.D.

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