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  In attempting a thumbnail account of what viewers might expect from MINDHUNTERS, the very kindest I was able to come up with is it has all the tawdry elements of American daytime TV soap operas with their tours de force of personality defects and psychological train wreckage. Stir all of the above into a an un-storyboarded plot common to every teen-horror flick ever made, and spice it up heavily with as many police movie bromides as time will allow. At least two of the false-red herrings were show-stoppers in that they proved in the end to be impossible - an unpardonable Cardinal cinematographic sin. The near-comical plot twists and reversals in the last five minutes will prove to be an indelible stain on Director Renny Harlin's career. Hollywood already has an arrest warrant out for Harlin, but he is now in exile in the Netherlands, where MINDHUNTERS was filmed. He's now attempting to peddle the film as "very camp, and tongue-in-cheek" in hopes of getting it into some obscure Bulgarian film festival. The best advice I can give Harlin is save as many copies of this film as you can, you will be burning them this winter to keep warm.
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Val Kilmer was headlined as the "star" of MINDHUNTERS, and movie viewers streamed into Bangkok's theaters believing it. He was this film's shill - he made two brief appearances, once alive and once dead. (He actually did a better job dead - as a flesh-and-blood puppet with Tourette's syndrome. Could it be the boy is losing his edge?) The only other actor of consequence was Christian Slater, but he too was killed early, when he froze himself with liquid nitrogen and broke himself into several icy chunks, à la Terminator II. This means the rest of the film was left to the B-Team, and at this point, one begins to understand that budgetary restraints were the big concern here. Not that lack of funds is to be condemned, but promoting these two "big names" as the stars, when they had brief, bit parts is pure scam, pure bunko.
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...And how could anyone have possibly guessed that the baddie was the erratic, highly strung Norman Bates look-alike? Bore me no more.
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