THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS (1957)

There's been a lot of critical attention given to this fairly undistinguished grade-Z sci-fi film. It's perhaps a little better made than most of its ilk, and B-movie icon John Agar gives a decent performance in the lead role, but it winds up stuck between a rock and a hard place: not quite bad enough to be consistently campy fun, but not quite good enough to take seriously. After a strange explosion in the desert, nuclear scientist Agar gets abnormally high radioactivity readings near Mystery Mountain, so he and his young assistant (Robert Fuller) head out to see what's up. They find a new cave blasted into the base of the mountain and when they enter, a giant floating transparent brain with eyes kills Fuller and possesses Agar. The brain from Arous has a name, Gor, and its mission is the same old tedious one, to take over Earth. When Agar goes back home without Fuller and begins acting strangely (sometimes he's horny, sometimes he's got splitting headaches that cause him to double up in growling pain), his girlfriend (Joyce Meadows) suspects something's amiss and asks her father to help her find out what's wrong. The two head out to the mountain, find the dead assistant, and discover a second brain, Vol, this one a sort of cosmic-policeman brain (l'll just call them Good Brain and Bad Brain) which takes possession of Agar's dog (!) to keep an eye on him (assuming the dog will be in Agar's presence more than anyone else). Soon Bad Brain Agar calls a meeting of world diplomats to demand acquiescence, showing them his destructive power--he brings down a couple of planes and destroys houses just by looking at them. Good Brain Dog and his helpers eventually figure out a way to destroy the Bad Brain without harming Agar, involving taking an axe to the Bad Brain (at the "fissure of Rolando," an actual name for a spot in the brain--thank you, Google) when it materializes outside of Agar's body. Everything goes as planned, and Agar and Meadows are happy again, except that her dad has been fried by the Bad Brain, and the two start to make out next to Dad's corpse.

The basic filmmaking here is competent (directing, lighting, sets), but the special effects are terrible. The brains are mostly simply see-through double-exposures, and when Bad Brain becomes solid, it's a big helium balloon with ping-pong ball eyes sailing through the air on very visible wires. The plane crashes are also incompetently handled: a miniature model swinging against a black background bursts into flames and dangles from a wire. The destruction of property is courtesy the famous footage of houses that were destroyed in United States atom bomb tests. The one good effect is when Bad Brain Agar goes ballistic and his eyes become dark and shiny (contact lenses, I assume, like Ray Milland wears in the climax of MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES); that, combined with Agar's over-the-top grimacing and cackling, actually works. The movie starts out with very little exposition; I had assumed that Fuller was perhaps Agar's kid brother, or Meadows' kid brother, or someone's boy toy, and, hell, he might be any of those things, but as far as I could tell, he's just an assistant who maybe lives with Agar(?). I do like one of the opening shots, of serious scientist Agar talking to young Fuller, who's stretched out on a sofa reading a science-fiction magazine. A couple other cheap delights: 1) a nice shot of Agar's face distorted through a water cooler; 2) Bad Brain Agar calling earthlings "savages"; 3) when Meadows tells Bad Brain Agar that he might need psychological help from an expert, he shrieks at her, "Don't expert me!" Despite these occasional pleasures, the whole thing would play out much better as an Outer Limits episode. [DVD]