Remember back when movies were simple? Those were the days of believable characters, family values, patriotism, and giant, disembodied brains. Yep, they don”t make “em like they used to. “The Brain from Planet Arous,” a gem from the 1950″s atomic age of science fiction, is pure fun to watch.
- Paul Wong
- Courtesy of Image Entertainment
A strange pattern of radiation is being emitted from Mystery Mountain (subtle, eh?) in the California desert. When two scientists go to investigate, they find Gor, a huge alien brain with eyes who can communicate telepathically and kill anyone or destroy anything using his mind. He quickly invades Steve”s (John Agar) body and uses it to infiltrate human society. To make matters worse, Gor uses Steve”s body to make aggressive advances on Steve”s girlfriend. (Don”t try to figure out why a giant brain is attracted to a human female. This is one of the more logical parts of the film.)
Veteran sci-fi actor Agar (“Revenge of the Creature,” “The Mole People,” “Journey to the Seventh Planet”) is wonderfully cheesy and over the top as the possessed scientist, and the other characters are of the same caliber, considering the type of film that this is.
The movie is something that would have been the object of great ridicule on “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” but it”s actually a very entertaining film. Considering the thousands of bad films about giant ants, lobsters, aliens and space robots that sprung up during this era, “The Brain from Planet Arous” is actually quite good.
The film has some pretty good cinematography (once again, this is all relative), and it has a classic drum and horn suspense soundtrack that makes you grip your armrests and cover your eyes at all the right places.
The DVD doesn”t have a lot in terms of extra material, but it is impressive enough that they were able to resurrect the movie itself. There is, however, an original preview that is perfectly representative of the drive-in, Ed Wood type, cold war era of science fiction films, complete with squiggly white subtitles telling the of the “greatest power in the universe.”