by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Brain from Planet Arous, which we actually watched before Missile to the Moon, proved to be a real disappointment: too mediocre to be
effective as a genuine sci-fi thriller and not bad enough to be entertaining as
camp. The premise of this one is that the beings on the planet Arous have
become pure intellect and their bodies have been reduced so the only part that
remains are free-floating brains, which look like giant “brain” balloons (they
have two normal-looking eyes set in the front of their otherwise brain-like
grey matter). Two of Arous’
brain-people make it to earth; one is an evil brain called Gor with designs on
conquering the universe, while the other is Val, part of the brain police (finally answering the question Frank Zappa asked in one of his
best early songs, “Who Are the Brain Police?” — incidentally Sting wanted to name
his band the Brain Police but Frank Zappa threatened to sue, so they achieved
fame simply as The Police) who follows Gor to earth to capture and/or kill him.
Gor takes possession of the body of nuclear physicist Steve March (John Agar,
once again trying to copy the vocal tics and mannerisms of his good friend John
Wayne for a part ridiculously unsuited to them) on the eve of a major nuclear
test in the Nevada desert. March announces to the government officials in
charge of the test that he’s going to give them a demonstration of his powers
that will be more destructive than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — and he
follows through by using his new-found mental powers to get an airliner to blow
itself to pieces in mid-air. During the extreme close-ups of March using Gor’s
mental energy to blow up planes and vaporize people (including his former
assistant Dan Murphy, played by Robert Fuller — whom it’s a pity to lose so
early because he’s not only the cutest guy in the film, he’s also its best
actor) it looks like John Agar is wearing spectacularly ill-fitting contact
lenses to make it look like his eyes are bulging out. According to one “trivia”
poster on imdb.com, that’s exactly how the special effects were done!
March demonstrates his powers by blowing up all the
model houses and people constructed in the desert to test the effects of the
bomb — the tests really were done with models to see how destructive the bombs
would be, and this footage was readily available both in newsreels and in
movies like the unspeakably bad Mickey Rooney vehicle for Republic, The
Atomic Kid (ah, how the mighty had
fallen!). When I saw these clips — first in the trailer (included here as a
bonus item) and then in the film itself — I joked, “Special effects by the U.S.
government!” The sight of the toy buildings blowing up before they were supposed to causes the world’s governments to
yield to March’s demand that they convene a meeting of plenipotentiary
representatives of the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, India and China (“Which China?” Charles joked) so he can present his demands to
them — and when the meeting occurs March informs them that the entire earth’s
population will become slave laborers to build spaceships so he can create an
invasion fleet that will conquer the universe on his (Gor’s) behalf. Meanwhile
Val, the cop-brain sent from Arous to catch or destroy Gor the crook-brain, has
a meeting with the only two people with any apparent connection to March: his
girlfriend Sally Fallon (Joyce Meadows) and her father John (Thomas Browne
Henry). They talk about who Val can take over so he can have a human body in
order to catch Gor, but instead of imposing his will on either of the people he
ends up taking over March’s dog. Val explains to the Fallons that every 24
hours or so Gor has to leave March’s body to replenish his oxygen supply (why
he can’t supply himself oxygen through the same normal respiration process that
March used to sustain his normal human-born brain is not explained by writer
Ray Buffum), and once he does this he can be killed by a blow across the
fissure of Rolando, the seam down the middle of the brain. It’s helpfully
illustrated in a copy of the Encyclopedia Americana from which Sally tears out the relevant page and leaves it
with a note so March will know how to kill his malevolent brain-possessor once
it leaves his body and becomes a brain-guy again. March takes up the
opportunity and grabs an ax, though he keeps flamboyantly missing the brain by
so much it’s hard to understand exactly how Gor does die — but he does, Val heads back to Arous with his
mission accomplished and the world is safe for niceness ever after.
Probably
the most frightening part of The Brain from Planet Arous is the make-up credit to Jack P. Pierce (the Frankenstein
monster’s, the Wolf-Man’s and the Mummy’s creator — once again, how the mighty
had fallen!); other than that it’s a barely competent sci-fi movie that takes a
preposterous premise and makes it at least halfway believable. The biggest
problem with it is the risible appearance of the brains (plural) from planet
Arous — especially Gor bobbing around at the end on wires like a particularly
nasty helium balloon sold for Hallowe’en — but John Agar’s acute limitations as
an actor (to put it politely) also hurt the film. Delivered with the panache
and élan of Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, March’s lines when he’s announcing his Gor-driven
intentions to conquer the universe would sound positively chilling; out of the
mouth of a bland screen presence like John Agar, whose only hint of dramatic
expression was to try to sound like John Wayne, they just sound like the
ravings of a harmless lunatic. The Brain from Planet Arous was directed by Nathan Juran, though on this occasion (and
on some others when he was similarly embarrassed by the quality, or lack of
same, of the script he was given) he used his middle name and had himself
credited as Nathan Hertz. (Juran, under his actual name, worked on such sci-fi
and fantasy spectaculars as The Black Castle, 20 Million Miles to Earth and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, though the main reason one would watch The Seventh
Voyage of Sinbad is the still-impressive
effects work by the recently departed Ray Harryhausen, proving for all time
that given enough artistry and patience stop-motion animation can still hold its own against CGI for believability and spectacle.)
The director formerly known as Juran does his best with an impossibly silly
script and an actor who can’t rise even to its limited challenges, but The
Brain from Planet Arous plods through 71
minutes of running time and, as I noted at the outset, isn’t good enough to be
entertaining as drama and isn’t bad enough to be entertaining as camp either.
One noteworthy aspect of this film is it was released by Howco International,
whose name derived from its owner, Joy Houck — at a time when it was a rarity
for a woman to be involved as a CEO or top executive of any film company, even a cheap-jack outfit like this! [Actually Joy Houck was a man — and to make it worse, he named his own son Joy Houck, Jr.!]
