Among many other concurrent identities, the mid ‘50s through early ‘60s represent the golden age of the classic monster movie, with the cumulative guilt, grief and uncertainty of buttoned-down post-WWII life finally unleashed via a psychologically reflective stable of grotesque, misshapen antagonists. Focusing for the most part on looming environmental and political uncertainties, these creature features all orbit around the imported Godzilla model, which concentrated Japan’s lingering nuclear trauma into a single monolithic adversary. Whether externalizing fears that man’s cavalier treatment of his planet’s resources would hold dire consequences (Them, The Fly, The Incredible Shrinking Man), dreaming up sinister alien beings to function as stand-ins for Soviets and their communist allies abroad and at home The Day The Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob), the best of these movies distilled some widespread apprehension down into a memorable monster avatar. The rest, from Creature From the Black Lagoon to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and countless other forgettable trifles, ended up with incoherent, boring or sensational takes on these concerns, consigning themselves to the great void of bargain bin mediocrity.
Of course, America wasn’t the only country feeling these fears, and not the only one to pick up on the lucrative possibilities of men in rubber suits terrorizing histrionic D-list actors. For most cinephiles, 1950s and ‘60s Mexico isn’t the most fertile territory, remembered primarily for the work Buñuel did before being rediscovered by the European festival crowd and spirited back to France. Yet the same year he made The Exterminating Angel, anonymous workman director Chano Urueta produced a far less effective take on the horrors of upper class conformity, with the weird yet disappointingly unimaginative The Brainiac. Picking up on one of the familiar Godzilla theme – an ancient evil being unleashed to wreak havoc on an unprepared modern world – the film doubles down on the historical focus, dispensing with any relevant contemporary concerns in the process.
This focus centers around a specific historic moment, with the avenging monster manifesting as an unjustly executed victim of the Spanish Inquisition, reappearing 300 years later to seek revenge on the descendants of his murderers. Burned for heresy in 1661, Baron Vitelius de Estara makes his return upon the reappearance of the comet that streaked through the sky as he was sentenced to death. He has, for some reason, evolved into a lobster-like creature with a pulsing rubber face, with a long tongue capable of sucking people’s brains clean out of their skulls. He also has the handy ability of assuming the appearance of his victims, which he uses to disguise himself as a suave visiting dignitary, taking up residence in the man’s fancy diplomatic digs. He uses this mansion as a home base, luring in unassuming progeny of the men against whom he swore revenge, all of them still wealthy and well-heeled enough to inspire his revivified rage.
Befitting its B-movie status, The Brainiac mostly pieces together parts from other, more innovative horror flicks of the era, most specifically the brain construction angle of 1958’s Fiend Without a Face.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – this sort of borrowing and reassembly is a feature that even the best movies of this genre were founded on – but this is not a film to which the appellation ‘best’ should ever be attached. The Brainiac does have its strong points, including a fairly firm handle on mise en scène and overall direction, most notably in the initial interrogation scene, which promises a level of carefully crafted intensity that the rest of the film can’t come close to matching. There’s also relatively inventive sound design, particularly in the creature’s throaty gargle roar, and the feature of a light flashing on the villain’s face before he transforms into monster mode, freezing men in their tracks and drawing women to their doom, is a pretty neat effect. A late scene, in which the beast simultaneously wipes out two modern enemies and the records of his own conviction, bodies burning amid a pile of antique court papers, is genuinely striking.
Unfortunately, such moments are few and far between, and not remotely representative of the film’s overall level of quality. Once it lands on its formula, in which The Brainiac seduces, stalks and kills his victims – all of whom he’s met at a conveniently occurring early cocktail party – it quickly becomes so boring that its badness barely registersin any interesting way. The primary problem here is that the movie places a near-exclusive focus on its villain at the excpense of all other characters, but then invests him with no personality or charisma whatsoever. It would be fun to get on the side of an undead baron as he transforms from ghastly, cheap-suited monster to debonair tuxedo-wearing, martini-swilling murderer and back, but the film provides no incentive to do so, leaving him as a moustache-twirling cardboard cutout in both forms, despite a few brief glimpses of him snacking on a tureen of brains with a slender silver spoon. Clearly a slapdash assembly line product, The Brainiac comes enticingly close to inspired madness and inspires some interest as a window onto a foreign production model, but it largely settles for rote reproduction of low-rent horror tropes.