Brainiac

This here is a good and proper creature feature from the start of the 60s. While these things died out a long time before I was born, in part because they mostly weren’t very good, it’s still fun to revisit them every now and again. It’s especially fun when they don’t really suck like Monstroid did, and this film achieves that lofty goal.

The film opens with an evil baron being burned at the stake for dabbling in witchcraft. As he’s being burned (though he seems strangely unharmed by it) he yells that he’s going to reappear on a passing comet 300 years in the future to kill his attackers’ descendants. Naturally, in the interests of time, we immediately jump ahead 300 years to the present day of 1961, as the comet he hitched himself to returns to Earth and he immediately sets out to kill off pretty much everyone in town.

One key thing that sets this film apart from other creature features is that the baron in this doesn’t really get by by being a big scary monster that just overpowers people. Instead, he teleports, paralyzes and bewitches people with his eyes, and then transforms into a goofy hairy bug eyed thing with only two pincer-like fingers on each hand that sucks the brains out of them by piercing their skulls with his overlong forked tongue (I’m assuming this is where the film gets its atrocious title). It’s over the top and silly, and what’s what always makes movies like this fun to watch. One particularly amusing part of the film is how each batch of descendants is made out to be even more noble and wonderful a group than the last, just before he kills them anyway, kind of like the characters played by Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets.

As with any of these films, it’s pretty damned uneven, with more parts that don’t work than do. It does, however, manage its own goofy charm and insane troll logic (the police in particular, once they realize that the mysterious baron who appeared in town immediately before the killings began is actually the killer, are amazing in what they decide is the best way to deal with him), and that’s really all you can hope for from a film like this.

Rating: **