Jonas Mekas in his Movie Journal, The Village Voice, May 14, 1970
Wynn Chamberlain's Brand X is constructed as a TV program. It's funny from beginning to end. The imagination that went into it is subtle and intelligent. The film is very well acted by Tally Brown, Sam Shepard, Joy Bang, Sally Kirkland, Frank Cavestani, Abbie Hoffman and others, but it is Taylor Mead who steals the show in his numerous impersonations. For the first time since Ron Rice, Taylor Mead seems to have had in Brand X challenges and tasks where he could really put his boundless inventiveness to work and comes up with some of his best acting in years. The film hits. It spoofs. It spits. It slashes and it lashes at all sides. And has a feeling and energy about it that is healthy, confident, strong and accusing. Brand X is propaganda for the politics of joy and disorder. Brand X shines like gold.
Bobby Abrams, Crawdaddy, May 21, 1970
"Wynn Chamberlain deserves every praise in the book, 'cause this is the beginning of a new cinema. It's the application of Fellini to content. Whereas the Italian filmmakers who came to prominence in the sixties concerned themselves with style, (is Fellini hard to follow now? I suggest not), and whereas the early underground filmmakers rarely created a satisfactory entity, we now have a film maker who can handle poetry as texture, poetry as style and poetry as meaning."
Raymond A. Sokolov, 'The Last Taboo' Newsweek Magazine, May 25, 1970
The people who made Brand X, Director Wynn Chamberlain, Cameraman John Harnish and underground performers like Taylor Mead and Sally Kirkland know where it's at; sexually, politically and pop culturally. They understand that straight and kinky America exist side by side. What Brand X does is bring the two cultures together in an outrageously raunchy parody of normal television programming. A hospital soap opera turns into an orgy on the patient's bed. A commercial shows a classy red car cruising down a country road with a couple on the hood making love. Abbie Hoffman of the Chicago Seven bathes naked in a tub full of money. And a unisex paragon fools the panel on 'What's My Sex'…A slapstick weather show, a lunatic Presidential press conference and a sermon improvised by Taylor Mead could technically run on the air, but one knows they never would. That is the brilliant fundamental joke of Brand X: it transgresses the last taboo - the sanctity of the television tube.
Lil Picard, inter/View Magazine, May 1970
(Abridged)
Chamberlain's Brainstorm attack on the TV Machine of the USA is political satire of the highest order yet has the quality of a revue, or cabaret, and in this sense it is political cabaret.
Bertolt Brecht, while living in exile as a refugee from the German disaster, wrote a poem whose first line reads, 'REALLY WE ARE LIVING IN DISATROUS TIMES.' It could be that Brand X done in 1969 and shown in May 1970, will become a Brechtian truth-comedy. The press conference with Taylor Mead as President of the United States and Sally Kirkland as the soap bubbling, pouting, golden haired star spangled-clad First Lady, may be prophetic indeed for many of the things we are about to experience.
The laughter in the beginning sequences is overwhelmingly startling; the laughter of Beckett in ENDGAME, only in the bright red flesh color of spilled blood.
As a work of film art BRAND X is to me a truly American slapstick Godard and Marx Brothers tragic comedy . I noticed at the premiere the laughter of the first nighters was subdued, I think because the reality we experience today and the parody of it on the screen were both so frightening.
Taylor Mead is the dying poet-swan of the New York Underground, buried under the red bloodstained sheets of a hospital scene... a fluttering fragile, limp clown whose message is serious and sad … a mind guided funny man a poet of parody and satire... hilarious wit mixed with deadly poison... this anti hero with the El Greco face, the big intelligent eyes, telling the people of the underground about GOD, dialing SUFFERING 4678 to ask him for help...but GOD'S number is BUSY and Taylor fades away in the red white and blue Star Spangled Banner.
(Lilian Picard died in 1994 in New York City. She was blind,lived alone and died without descendants. Born in Germany in 1899,she lived through the First World War,The Wiemar Republic and, as she called it, The German Disaster. In 1935 her husband's Bank was "Arianized" and the couple fled to America. This review to me was one of the few reviews of the film which placed it in historical perspective, culturally and artistically...WC)
Howard Thompson, in the New York Times.
"Devilishly, piercingly funny. Human skin is a fixation with repeated commercials on body odor and self-applied dirt."
Penelope Gillatt, New Yorker Magazine
"Filthy, good-humored, crass."
Lita Eliscue, in the Los Angeles Free Press
"Brand X is not only Healthy but Beautiful."
Archer Winsten, New York Post.
"Scenes of, 'doing it on the road' are enacted with a spirit that makes sex education films seem positively anemic."