The Brain From Planet Arous (1957)

Around 1957, the filmgoing public was treated to a plethora of science fiction films. It had been four years since the Area 51 incident made headlines, then was completely wiped out of the media by the Air Force (Hmmm...conspiracy, anyone?). World War 2 was over, and the Cold War was rearing its ugly head.

People were paranoid. Joseph McCarthy and President Eisenhower had Americans believing your neighbor could be a Communist. This paranoia that slipped into our collective consiousness drifted over into movie themes. Science Fiction films have always been a medium where movie makers could give us serious social issues disguised as entertainment without being preachy. Communism was scary because for the first time, Americans couldn't tell who the bad guys were. It was an idea, something anyone could be consumed by, so your friends, neighbors, and anyone else could be a potential threat.

What if your best friend or fiance was taken over by some hostile presence. How would you react? In The Brain From Planet Arous, that is basically the plot. In a nutshell, an alien call Gor comes to Earth and chooses a host, in this case a nuclear scientist Steve March, played by the sci-fi everyman John Agar. Agar was known for Tarantula, The Mole People, and Daughter of Dr. Jeckyll. It was Brain that made him the leading man, and he gets to showcase two totally different personalities, which he does well. As the kind scientist, Dr. March, he is compasssionate, humorous, and very tender with his soon-to-be bride Sally Fallon (Joyce Meadows). When he is under the control of giant brain thingy Gor, he is vicious, callous and crude. He dances between the two personalities in a believable way.

His girlfriend's father John Fallon is played by Thomas Brown Henry, also no stranger to 50's sci-fi, being seen in such movies as Beginning of the End, 20 Million Miles to Earth, and this movie in 1957 alone. His characters are always affable, no-nonsense guys. In this movie, he is skeptical when Sally tells him about Steve's sudden change. He goes along with it, however, and leads her to the spot where Steve had his alien encounter.

Gor himself is an interesting take on alien design. As the title suggests, he is in fact a large brain. He has the ability to take over someone's body and control them, and is invincible when he is in what they call his 'transitory' state, basically a ghost-like image without physical form. Only when he has to rest and recharge his oxygen does he have his physical, and therefore vulnerable, state.

Later, we meet Vol, Gor's enemy and a good-guy from planet Arous. Vol explains the rules to Sally and her father, as well as how to kill Gor. Vol also has the ability to take over other living things to monitor what's going on. After some discussion, he decides to take over the family dog, since the dog can hang around Steve without arousing suspicion. I should note here that there may by two versions of this movie. I have seen at least one review that states Vol takes over Sally, not the dog. The print that I watched does not have this.

Under the influence of Gor, Steve uses his position in to gain access to atomic testing experiments. There he demonstrates his telekenetic powers, blowing up planes and buildings with his mind. He basically blackmails military leaders into his plan, which includes enslaving humans and building interstellar ships and weapons so he can take over his home planet.

The effect when he does his destruction is convincing. John Algar had to wear thick black contact lenses to achieve the alien looking stare when he uses his powers. The effect is rather chilling, even today. For me, practical effects like that will always be superior to the CGI renderings currently in use.

At any rate, the movie moves along rapidly enough to keep people with a short attention span like myself happy. There is plenty of mayhem without gore, and solid performances all around. Fans of Paranoid Sci-fi Schlock of ther 50's will be very happy with The Brain From Planet Arous.

Brain was scored by the great Walter Green. The music was heavy at just the right time, and etherial and mysterious when it needed to be. Special effects were not very extensive, with only a couple of model shots involving planes and some compositing to show the brain alien going into his host person. The final sequence involving the brain in his physical form is pretty cool, although you can easily see the wires holding him up. But for me, that is part of the overall draw to these movies. It is a sincere effort to entertain, and this one does not disappoint. It is highly recommended. 3 1/2 out of 4.

Didja Know?

The director Nathan Juran did not share my enthusiasm for this film, insisting that he be billed as Nathan Hertz in the credits, to avoid emberrasment.

Here is a quick look at the original trailer:

Mission Stardust (1967)

Also known as ...4 ...3 ...2 ...1 ...morte

Starring Lang Jeffries


Movie theme is a trippie, hippyish song, set to psychadelic colors.

During one important scene about 13 minutes in, I missed much of the expositional dialog because I couldn't stop laughing at the extra in the background leaping around like a freak and shadow boxing

The bad guy is pretty easy to spot early on. In 'B' Movies, one of the give-aways is wealth. Like the Democratic party, movie makers in the 50's and 60's typically believed that anybody with any measure of success must have gotten there by some illegal means, and therefore cannot be trusted. The wealthy guy must have some interest in the mission.

The 'aliens' of this movie are disappointing. It seems Mission Stardust falls into the Rocketship XM trap, and gives us regular humans saying, "Trust me-I'm from another world."

It seems the main alien...

Wait, at least his name is something cool and Alien-esque, like Xandar?

...whose name is even a regular human name - Chris - is sick...

So, he has a cool Alien-esque disease, right? Like Andorian Shingles?

.

...with plain ole' Leukemia. The astronauts' mission is now to travel back to Earth with the aliens and find a famous doctor with a convenient serum for this disease.

The bottom line is this movie is merely ok. The visuals are nice for the technology of the day, the alien characters are blah, and the acting non-existent. I've measured the entertainment value using my Calcinator Ray, and it says if you watch this, your death will be INDESCRIBABLE. Well, maybe that's overkill, but look, you can watch it if you want, but I'd skip it. Final Verdict: 1 1/2 out of 4.

Didja Know?

Jeffries was supposedly one of only three survivors out of an Army unit of 177 who, during the Korean War, landed in Inchon, though I can't confirm this.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror

A Moviehead Pictures
Production
Cast:
Alan Bagh…..Rod
Whitney Moore…Nathalie
Damien Carter…Nightclub Singer, also credited with writing
and performing “Just Hanging Out”
Mona Lisa Moon….Mai
Crew:
Director, screenplay author:
James Nguyen

OK, let’s get something out of the way right off the bat. Birdemic is awful. It represents incompetence on every single level. The acting is bad, the effects are atrocious, and the editing is
laughable. With so many undesirable traits, you might wonder what compelled me to finish it. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. Perhaps it’s a certain component in my DNA that makes me interested in these B Movies, you know, kind of like when you are driving along and you come upon a wreck. Obviously, it’s awful when someone has a wreck, and you really should drive along and keep traffic moving, but you don’t. You look. That’s kind of what this movie experience is like. It is so bad, you can’t look away. You almost have to keep looking, just to see what happens next.


The easiest feature to pick on is the visual effects. The birds of the aforementioned Birdemic are essentially animated sprites that look like copied and pasted GIF images on the screen. Seriously, the birds rarely do anything besides hover in the same spot on screen flapping their wings in perfect formation. Visual effects technician Yeung Chan put the entire budget into one or two shots of the birds hovering, and one shot of a close-up bird flying in, and they used the same clips repeatedly.


We could also take shots at the acting, but it’s a little like shooting fish in a barrel here. The principle character, Rod, played by Alan Bagh, recites his lines with the mumbling monotone of a middle school play actor. In one scene, he is giving a presentation to some venture capitalists about his revolutionary solar panels. At least I think he is discussing solar panels. He keeps referring to “Solarpuhlz”, but in the context of his speech, I’m thinking “solar panels”.


Having said all that and taken my easy swipes at the cast and crew, there are some qualities that kept me interested. The cast isn’t stellar, but they do the best they can with what they are given. Whitney Moore as Nathalie does embody a sort of innocent enthusiasm that makes her character at least likeable. Although she and the other actress, the under-used Mona Lisa Moon have “love scenes” with their boyfriends, they are not graphic. Director James Nguyen did not allow nudity in his film, so when the characters jump up out of bed, the girls are wearing bathing suits. It seemed a little odd wearing bathing suits to bed, but the movie earned points for me for not devolving into porn like many B-films do. If you are familiar with any number of network TV shows, the actors in this movie wear more than you would see on girls in prime-time TV.

The movie also has a very not-so-subtle environmental message. The birds attack because of global warming. This approach is never satisfactorily explained. The characters also encounter a bizarre mountaineer guy who watches over the forest like some kind of nature guru. The group also comes across the token science guy who lays out for them the global-warming scenario with enough science jargon that we basically have to accept that he is right.

The movie features a synthesized track that is not bad, but it’s not great. I was curious, so I read the credits at the end, because I have that kind of time. Many songs are attributed to Smartsound Software, although I only heard one piece of scoring about 10 seconds long, which is repeated ad infinitum. Also, there is some original live music played in the nightclub scene. Damien Carte plays “Nightclub Singer”, and is credited with writing and performing “Just Hanging Out”, which is admittedly catchy and stayed in my brain for the rest of the night.

Special makeup effects by John Garcia are pretty well-conceived. Now, when I say well-conceived, remember we’re talking about within the context of an independently financed movie by people who haven’t made many movies. We’re not talking about Avatar here. To be fair, I have step aside here and remind you that Avatar’s director James Cameron got his start working for Roger Cormen, who made movies not that different from Birdemic. OK, back to the makeup effects.

It seems that these new global-warming enhanced birds spit acid on people to gruesome effect. Actually, I didn’t know it was acid at first. I learned after reading another synopsis of the movie on the Internet Movie Database. In the film, when the birds fly by, victims fall over with acid on them, and it looks like they suffered from fatal bird droppings.

You might get the impression that I’m beating up on this movie, but that is not the case. The truth is, for all its faults, this is a unique gem. The cheap effects and amateur acting actually become part of the charm. What some people receive as a Z-grade movie experience, I actually admire. Here, a young group of film makers with more enthusiasm than talent put lots of effort into their labor of love, and completed their project without any help (translation: financial backing) from Hollywood studios. The director worked a full-time job as a software salesman while supporting this movie, shooting around his home of Half Moon Bay, California, spending his own money on the entire project, plus the rather unique marketing strategy.

Nguyen didn’t merit inclusion into any of the major film festivals, so he brought a van to them, covered with stuffed birds. Additionally, he handed out flyers thrown together with artwork from the movie, and a link to his web site. Unfortunately, in his haste he misspelled his own web site URL, so people who took his flyer home were looking for http://www.bidemic.com/, spelled without the ‘r’. Win for enthusiasm, Fail for talent.

All in all, the movie represents a sort of triumph. Nguyen may not be ready to take on Scorsese just yet, but he gritted his teeth for reportedly 5 years making this movie happen. He couldn’t have spent a whole lot making it, so it’s highly unlikely not to have turned a profit, with its growing popularity with a small but devoted cult following. Who knows, maybe in a few years, it will reach notoriety in a post-mortem kind of way, much like the infamous Troll 2. And if Birdemic 2 does show up at the Cineplex, I’ll get in line. If nothing else, it will be to see what happens next.

Moments that make you say, “What the...”

• At one point in the story, our hero is mugged by
  a guy for his gasoline. The robber successfully acquires the gas, begins to
  back away and is then quickly killed by the birds. The hero then just leaves.
  Why? He could have gotten the can of gas back, plus another wickedly cool gun.
  But he just leaves it all there.

• It’s probably just as well. The guns used by the
  main characters have a bottomless clip, anyway.
  
• Speaking of guns that defy logic, our intrepid
  heroes come across a busload of tourists who are being terrorized by the birds.
  The heroes spray the bus with bullets to try to shoot the birds, missing 99% of
  the time, while simultaneously not affecting the bus at all.
  
• The guy then convinces the tourists to exit the
  bus with him, and they all die immediately after getting out of the bus,
  including the idiot with the gun. Worst rescue ever.

Final Verdict: An enjoyable movie, on 'B-Movie' terms...Three out of Four.