In 1951, two owners of small but successful independent cinema chains in the States joined forces. J Francis White owned 31 cinemas in Virginia and the Carolinas, while Joy Houck operated 29 houses in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Together, they formed Howco Productions with a plan to produce their own low budget product to meet the demand of their customers. And these really were low budget efforts, the company putting money into the like of Mesa of Lost Women (1953) and early Edward D. Wood films. In 1957, they paid producer Jacques Marquette to come up with a science fiction double bill and the result was The Brain from Planet Arous and Teenage Monster, the latter shot as Monster on the Hill, its title changed to reflect the recent interest in the recently christened demographic following the success of American International Pictures’ I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957).
The Brain from Planet Arous is a notoriously silly alien intrusion film but one not without some very wayward charm. Nuclear scientists (their actual disciplines are glossed over) Steve March (1950s low budget science fiction perennial John Agar) and Dan Murphy (Robert Fuller) investigate when some of their monitoring equipment starts to detect abnormal levels of radioactivity coming from a mountain. Battling searing heat (it’s mentioned twice that it’s 120 degrees), they find a newly created cave and inside a giant, floating brain. It renders both men unconscious and possesses March’s body – working on a very tight budget, the production could keep the special effects spend down this way. A week later, March turns up alone at his laboratory and, telling his fiancée, Sally Fallon (Joyce Meadows), and her father John (Thomas Browne Henry) that they found nothing suspicious, and that Dan gone to Las Vegas. March learns that the brain, an alien named Gor (voiced by an uncredited Dale Tate), is on the run from the planet Arous as Sally becomes increasingly concerned about his erratic behaviour. She and her father are approached by a second brain, Vol (Tate again), who tells them that he is in pursuit of Gor who is now planning the conquest of Earth. Gor uses March to commit acts of violence and terror (his eyes start to glow when Gor is in control, using the same metallic contact lenses that Gary Lockwood would wear in the Star Trek (1966-1969) episode Where No Man Has Gone Before.) while Sally, John and Vol – now living inside the body of George, Sally’s dog, try to find a way to thwart his evil schemes.
On paper (or on website), it sounds like it should be something a gem. But on-screen it struggles with Nathan Juran’s plodding direction (as with all films he disliked, he signed this one Nathan Herz), ho-hum performances and dialogue that skates perilously close to Edward D. Wood at his most ridiculous (“Tomorrow, there will be a new world. You people have small minds. You are unable to grasp the importance of today’s events. You are about to succeed where Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler have failed. Through me, you will have ruled the world. But I will rule the universe.”)
It’s at its most enjoyable when the eponymous brains are on screen and turn out to be inflated brain-shaped balloons with silly eyes stuck on them – Agar goes above and beyond our expectations in his final confrontation with Gor, gamely whacking away at it wit an axe and somehow managing not to burst it. They really are the most ridiculous monsters but there’s something almost endearing about their ultra-low budget tattiness. For reasons best known to screenwriter Ray Buffum (who co-writer The Brain from Planet Arous‘ double bill partner and Frank Tuttle’s Island of Lost Women (1959)), Gor is a lecherous old cerebrum, showing some decidedly unseemly interest in Sally – “She appeals to me. There are some aspects of the life of an Earth savage that are exciting and reward, things that are missed by the brains on my planet Arous.” Perhaps thankfully, Buffum doesn’t take the idea much further than a few winking dialogue exchanges – it might have a been a step too far for a film aimed squarely at a younger audience.
There are moments here that are unintentionally hilarious – that axe-vs-brain encounter is one, and an exploding model aircraft is a hoot – though one suspects that Juran was actually trying to play the whole thing seriously. Indeed, it’s often the earnestness of the proceedings that raises the biggest laughs. And despite everything it has going against it. The Brain from Planet Arous is stupidly entertaining, a ridiculous but likable enough film that you’ll likely forget as soon as its over, but which keeps the interest up and the belly laughs coming for a harmless enough 71 minutes.
If intergalactic brain monsters were your thing, you’d have been better advised to wait a year for Arthur Crabtree’s much more fun Fiend Without a Face (1958) which, after a slow build-up, finally delivers with its preambulatory brain creatures that often meet surprisingly bloody ends. There are also some superficial similarities to Jack Sholder’s 1987 film The Hidden, which also features aliens (slug-like in this case) possessing human bodies for all sorts of nefarious business. Both may have taken more than a little from a 1950 novel by Hal Clement, Needle, which also features an alien “cop” pursuing its quarry to Earth and finding that it can live symbiotically within a human host.
Crew
Directed by: Nathan Hertz [real name: Nathan Juran]; © MCMLVII [1957] by Howco Productions, Inc.; Howco International presents a Marquette Productions. Released by Howco International; Produced by: Jacques Marquette; Associate Producer: Dale Tate; Screenplay by: Ray Buffum; Director of Photography: Jacques Marquette; Supervising Film Editor: Irving Schoenberg; Music Composed and Conducted by: Walter Greene; Make-up: Jack Pierce
Cast
John Agar [Steve March]; Joyce Meadows [Sally Fallon]; Robert Fuller [Dan Murphy]; Thomas B. Henry [John Fallon]; Kenneth Terrell [colonel in conference room]; Henry Travis [Colonel Frogley]; E. Leslie Thomas [General Brown]; Tim Graham [Sheriff Wiley Paine]; Bill Giorgio [Russian]
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