THE BRAIN EATERS

1958/Director: Bruno VeSota/ Writer: Gordon Urquhart

Cast: Ed Nelson (also producer), Leonard Nimoy, Alan Frost, Joanna Lee, Jody Fair, David Hughes, Robert Ball, Greigh Phillips, Orville Sherman

This not a film to write home about in any sense of the word-however it is film to do a post on The Uranium Cafe about obviously- but at a mere sixty minutes and featuring an early performance by Leonard Nimoy (billed as Leonard Nemoy) it is not a total waste of time. It was produced by and starring B-movie and TV staple Ed Nelson and directed by character actor Bruno VeSota (the sexually frustrated fat guy in Attack of the Giant Leeches) and so based on The Puppet Master by Robert A. Heinlein that AIP was sued for outright plagiarism. Roger Corman arranged to have the matter settled out of court for $5000 and the promise that Heinlein receive no credit for “inspiring” Gordon Urqhart’s lifeless screenplay. But as I said, the film is not really that bad that it cannot be seen and enjoyed if there is nothing else on.

The story moves along at a tolerable pace and is aided by an often campy and unnecessary narration. For example in one scene we are told that the heroes are visiting the local telegraph station, but there is not need to inform us of this since we can see with own two eyes that they are doing this. But it adds for some laughs, though I assume the are unintended.The basic story is that the residents of peaceful Riverdale Illinois have not only recently been plagued by violent murders and now must contend with the sudden appearance a huge alien craft that has either come from space or the bowels of the Earth. I am not clear on this. The mystery is compounded when a scientist believed long lost reappears from the craft after some fifty years. Some of the town’s folk have fallen prey to small parasitic organisms that look like little “tribbles” (as in the classic Star Trek episode) with pipe cleaners for antennae that attach to the base of their necks and control their thoughts and actions. Scientist Paul Kettering (Ed Nelsen) is hot on the mystery and even journeys into the alien craft seeking answers, which are not forthcoming. A lot of the action winds up being fist fights or gun battles between the infected and uninfected, or verbal sparring between everyone and the cantankerous Senator Powers (Cornelius Keefe, billed as Jack Hill and so it is not director Jack Hill in an early acting role as is often thought). On a return trip inside the ship Kettering finds another long lost scientist, Professor Cole under total control of the alien creatures and who is played by Leonard Nimoy, but you would not know if not for the voice. The story ends with high voltage wires frying the little brain eaters to death and the hero dying to save the girl.

The movie has potential with the material but does not do too much with it. What have been better is if the people under the control of the creatures were not so apparent. Some act like zombies practically. It would have had more tension had the cast and audience not known who was and was not infected, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing. I would also say a little more violence would have helped, as well as more frightening creatures. To the film’s credit it does not go over board with scientific explanations and long dialogs as is typical of a lot of films of the period. The movie takes itself too seriously and the laughs are unintentional, which can always make for a good time.

The movie poster is one of my favorites, but here is no scene in the entire film like it. There is no woman with vampire fangs and exposed brain, or hordes of people fleeing some terrible monster. In fact the monsters are little fuzz balls that a horde of fleeing people would squash. Can I recommend the film? Sure. It is required cult film viewing in fact, and as I said it is only about an hour in length, about the same time you would spend at the dentist’s getting a cleaning. Our next film seems to operate on a lower budget but in my opinion delivers more of the goods in the action and camp departments. So now that our brains have been eaten, let us see what it is like to have our flesh consumed in The Flesh Eaters.

THE FLESH EATERS

1964/Director: Jack Curtis/ Writer: Arnold Drake

Cast: Martin Kosleck, Byron Sanders, Barbara Wilkin, Rita Morley, Ray Tudor

All the action in The Flesh Eaters takes place on a small island off the Atlantic coast where five people must face a ravenous, microscopic organism that consumes human flesh in a matter of seconds. The budget for the film by director Jack Curtis is obviously very low and according to one story was subsidized by winnings his wife made on a TV game show. The characters are all comic bookishly two dimensional (and not surprisingly since the screen writer was comic book writer Arnold Drake): a mad Nazi Scientist, a drunken former screen queen, a down on his luck pilot, a zany beatnik and a good hearted gal with huge hooters she is not adverse to showing now and then.

The evil Nazi Peter Bartell, played by Martin Kosleck-who made a career of playing evil Nazis-is the man experimenting with refining the flesh eater experiment that was begun during the war. His experiments are interrupted when the plane being flown by studly looking Grant Murdoch (Byron Sanders, most famous for his role as Talbot Huddleston in the soap opera The Days of our Lives) has to land off the coast because of a violent storm. With him are his passengers, jaded former movie idol Laura Winters (Rita Morely) and her assistant Jane Letterman (Barbara Wilken). A rule in low budget sci-fi flicks is “lots of dialog over expensive effects” and this movie follows the rule from beginning to end, but the chat is actually not too bad. The acting is campy and hammy often enough but I get the sense the actors and crew knew this and had a little fun with what they were working with, and so The Flesh Eaters becomes a more watchable and enjoyable ride than The Brain Eaters.

The group is joined later by the most obnoxious character in the film, a beatnik named Omar who rants and raves about “love as the weapon” so often that we feel relieved when he has his entrails eaten from the inside out later with a microbe laced martini made by Professor Bartell. In one memorable scene hero Grant Murdoch must rescue lush Laura Winters who has walked out onto a jetty looking for her booze. He gets some of the flesh eaters (usually holes poked in the film) on his leg and they are removed by Bartell’s pocket knife. They need something to stop the bleeding and in no time sexy Jane Letterman removes her blouse and spends the rest of the scene in her white bra. I think my buddy Ghidorah over at How to Maintain your Chainsaw would appreciate this fine scene.

There are some actually gory death scenes in this film which were ahead of their time for 1964. I have mentioned the demise of Omar the beatnik, and a couple characters have similar explicit death scenes later. One thing that threw me for a loop was that at the end the surviving castaways must deal with a huge rubber monster after an attempt to electrify the microbes only cause them to grow and unify. In a very odd twist the thing that kills the beast (remember in old sci-fi flicks there is usually one special thing that does the beast in, never bullets of course, and it must be found and developed in the last twenty minutes of the film) is human blood delivered directly into the creature’s eye. Strange that a thing that consumes human flesh is killed by human blood.

The photography (by Curtis under the pseudonym Carson Davidson) is actually pretty good, and while the effects are pretty low budget they very effective for the time. The two women are pretty sexy and plump and the tension between super jock stud Grant Murdoch and evil genius Peter Bartell is stereotypical and amusing. This is a good bad movie and of the two reviewed here I recommend this one more highly. Not to missed by enthusiasts of midnight cinema.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under American Horror, Camp and Cheese Classic, Double Feature, Science Fiction-Fantasy . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.