A brain is a terrible thing to waste, especially if it’s watching cheesy-wheezy outer-space garbage from the atomic age of not-so-worried parents, juvenile delinquents, and duck-and-cover air raids (♫ Oh say can you see, by the light of the drive-in projector♫). Just as the myths of 1950s culture have been exaggerated over the years (think how cool it was when the Fonz jumped the shark), the myth that humans only use three percent of the brain is just as dumb as a brain that uses three percent of its brain! In fact (if you truly think about it), humans use one-hundred percent of brain capacity, which makes me scratch my head about how so many bad movies can come out of such calculations! As the space race and Cold War taxed the brains of adults across the United States, the children were thinking, “These adults are out of their minds!” and why wouldn’t they have a (un)healthy brain freeze of comic books, radio waves of rock ‘n’ roll, and cheap B movies all filled with rambunctious anti-hero, anti-matter, and of course, anti-good flicks! It doesn’t take a genius dressed in safari gear (with the largest pit stains known to humankind), a small pistol, and a radiometric measurement tool that looks like a 1980s industrial hair dryer (I know, you can’t live without it) to comprehend that great minds do not think alike when it comes to movie productions, or else movies like the 1957 out-of-this-world (and its mind) classic(?) The Brain from Planet Arous would have never come to the forefront of drive-ins and Saturday creature features throughout the cosmos!
In a post-Paramount Decree Hollyweird, in a time when theater owners were desperate for material to flicker across their vacant screens, small independents like American International Pictures, Republic Pictures, and Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) / Eagle-Lion were giving the big studios a run for their money by making dimes off of their B movie catalogs (some might contemplate they were actually Z or below for some) on their circuit known as “Poverty Row.” One such company was Howco International. The brainchild of three movie chain operators, Joy Newton Houck Sr., Ron Ormond, and J. Francis White (note that their last names are the initials H.O.W), who were frustrated with losing money from rentals, got the brilliant idea to contract filmmakers to make films to showcase in their theaters. Producing mostly westerns at first, like Outlaw Woman, they later branched out with several small productions that yielded big profits, like Roger Corman’s Carnival Rock and Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Jail Bait. However, like most “Poverty Row” studios, they found themselves in the mucky-yucky waters of horror and science fiction exploitation out of a desire for such popcorn delight from the younger crowds attending their theaters. Tasked with keeping costs low, producer Jacques Marquette remembered a sci-fi story by Hal Clement called “Needle,” which had only a few aliens instead of hundreds. Keeping in mind the need for only a few locations while developing the story, they were able to produce an alien invasion movie on a penny (roughly made for around one million, one hundred and sixty thousand nickels) to yield the dimes for later. Even though the invasion is very minimal overall, the use of black-and-white photography, carefully selected stock footage, and an atmospheric musical score by Walter Greene (who went on to do scores for such mind-numbing films like Teenage Doll and Hercules and the Captive Women) cannot make up for a short film that seems to use cogitation to see if its minuscule three percent budget can trick the minds of its pondering audience if the rest of the movie is floating out there in space (near the corrupt planet of Arous)!
Think about it. If an alien terrorist could come to Earth to corrupt the brainiac humans to do whatever it wants to do for its will, why not do it in the middle of a cheap desert where no one inhabits or survives? Thus, The Brain From Planet Arous starts with its wits at peak order to confuse a feeble-minded audience. As young scientist Steve March (played quite well by Revenge of the Creature and Tarantula! alum John Agar) rushes to the site of what he thinks is a new meteor crash, only to have his mind taken over by the creature Gor, a giant floating brain from the planet Arous, hellbent on destroying Planet Earth by taking over the feeble-minded minds of Earthlings. Although his fiancée seems to get the emotional brunt from this new conquest, the similar space creature Vol has a (burnt) light bulb turn on by inhabiting the mind of her dog, therefore informing (yes, the dog is a mind reader) Earthlings of Gor’s deepest, darkest desires for their destruction in the pit of his mind! Will they listen to the ramblings of a dog-gone-mad-dog, or will the people lose their minds over Gor’s mental health state?
Insane in the membrane at a headache-inducing seventy-one minutes, and directed by Nathan J. Juran (under the pseudonym Nathan Hertz, who would go on to direct such hits and misses as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf), the footage of Agar wielding an ax to the brain would be familiar to fans of the opening credits of Ernest Scared Stupid (MIAK!) and the hit 90s show Malcolm in the Middle. You can find this on most streaming services, but think real hard to buy the Monster Mayhem Blu-Ray Collection from Film Masters featuring this along with Monster from Green Hell, Frankenstein’s Daughter, and Giant From the Unknown. So, the next time you go to the movies and see a dumb movie where someone with metallic-looking eyes is laughing and sweating hysterically on screen, think to yourself, “Self, if I leave right now, it might not be such a bad idea?” Duh!
