Nobody’s brains get eaten in The Brain Eaters. Even if they’d wanted that to happen, producers AIP (Ed Nelson is the credited producer though Roger Corman apparently also worked on it, uncredited) wouldn’t have been willing to fund such an extravagance. What we get instead is an entirely unauthorised adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1951 novel The Puppet Masters – Heinlein successfully sued but was so unimpressed by the film that one of the conditions of his legal victory was that his name be kept off the credits.

Near Riverdale, Illinois, a cone-shaped structure that looks like the nose cone of a rocket or missile is discovered in the woods. Its arrival coincides with the deaths of several locals and with authority figures like the mayor (Orville Sherman) and the sheriff (Greigh Phillips) acting out of character. Washington assigns Senator Walter K. Powers (Cornelius Keefe), his assistant Dan Walker (Robert Ball) Dr Paul Kettering (Ed Nelson) to investigate They discover that the town is being over-run by small parasites, apparently from beneath the Earth and seemingly dating from the carboniferous period, who are attaching themselves to hosts and taking them over. Inside the strange metal structure they encounter a n old man, a member of a scientific expedition that vanished in the area years before (Leonard Nimoy) who tells them that the p’arasites are going to “force upon Man a life free from strife and turmoil.”

Star Trek (1966-1969) fans might find the presence of a “Leonard Nemoy” in the cast of some interest (it is indeed Mr Spock himself though whoever did the credits wasn’t paying attention) though they might not recognise him under his old man make-up even if his voice is unmistakable, and he’s only in it for a few minutes right at the very end. But for anyone else The Brain Eaters is a bit of a chore.

The opening shot strives for a film noir feel and it’s an impressively unexpected start that director Bruno VeSota simply can’t sustain across the rest of the film’s frugal 58 minutes (one of the men in the opening scene, incidentally, is an uncredited Hampton Fancher, later one of the co-writers of Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017)).VeSota tries to pep things up a bit here and there with some unexpected camera angles and the odd strange bit of framing but this former actor (Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), The Wasp Woman (1959), The Wild World of Batwoman (1966)) was never much cop as a director and he struggles to keep make things interesting.

The film has a choppy, disjointed feel to it that suggests that it may have been cut down from something more substantial – it was destined to prop up a double bill with Bert I. Gordon’s Earth vs the Spider (1958). The score, credited to Tom Jonson but mostly composed of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and pieces by Sergei Prokofiev, notably a cue from score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Aleksandr Nevskiy/Alexander Nevsky (1938), is used unmercilessly, always entirely inappropriately and seemingly there to just try to paper over the cracks a bit. There’s also a voiceover that alternates between telling us what we can see on the screen with our own eyes and filling in the gaps, again suggesting that what we’re watching isn’t what VeSota intended.

But his direction is so lifeless and obvious and Gordon Urquhart’s screenplay so derivative (not only of Heinlein but of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) without any of that film’s paranoia but a lot of wordy exposition) that perhaps sparing us another twenty minutes of this was doing us a favour. It has a few decent ideas, thanks to the source novel, but everyone is defeated by the budget, especially the uncredited effects artists who were so strapped for cash that the parasites turn out to be little toys with bits of fur attached to them.

The Brain Eaters is a muddled film (how are the parasites infecting people the night before the explosion that freed them from the Earth?) that attempts some clumsy political satire (the enemy is those damn Commies again, burrowing up from under our feet bringing with them empty promises of a Utopian future where personal autonomy is eroded) but ends up a cheap and often cheerless film that harbours ambitions it could never have hoped to achieve.

The 1950s were full of these sort of “Red Scare” alien invasion films in which small towns are infiltrated by soulless hordes determined to undermine the American way of life and The Brain Eaters, while far from being the worst, isn’t a patch of the classics. There are moments here and there that hint at a much better film if only the budget had stretched to better effects, more time to take care over the direction and photography and a better cast.

Heinlein’s novel was adapted again, credited this time but with many changes to the plot, in 1994 by Stuart Orme, who had a more substantial budget but still couldn’t bring to the story to the screen successfully. The most commercially successful adaptation of Heinlein’s work, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers followed in 1997 though it actually has very little to do with the novel it’s supposedly based on.