Sorry ladies and germs, despite the disdain held for the NFL by many bad movie fans (some of whom write for this site), there's a little voice inside of my head that comes in for visits between September and January. I'd tell him not to, but he's an old childhood friend and I'd feel bad if I didn't let him crash in my skull for a few months out of the year. Anyway, today was Christmas for him, so it looks like he'll be staying around another week. He just wanted to say his piece on the matter, so I'll try to make sure he doesn't interfere in the rest of this review. As such, without further ado, I bring to you the 1957 bad bad bad bad movie classic, The Brain From Planet Arous.

As anybody who read their way to the end of my X the Unknown review, you know I was originally going to review The Giant Claw as the 1957 entry into my "52 Weeks" project. Well, turns out that Sony booby trapped the Sam Katzman Cult Classics DVD set they put out recently, because when I popped in what I thought was a perfectly good duplicate disc into my DVD player, I got the stupid little Sony Pictures intro before the screen went black... and I'm talking Wesley Snipes black, not just some hiccup in the programming that freezes the main menu screen. Bastards and their insistence that people pay full price for their products... Fortunately for me, it just so happens that The Brain From Planet Arous is also a 1957 movie, so Sony can fuck off.

When a strange glowing spaceship crash lands into the oddly named Mystery Mountain out in the middle of, uhm, the desert, scientific buddy act Steve and Dan head out in their jeep to explore strange radiation readings coming from, you guessed it, Space Mountain... errr... Mystery Mountain. Noticing a mysterious pile of rocks they'd never noticed before, their investigation uncovers mysterious markings on the walls of a mysterious new cave formation, along with mysterious flashing lights, and... A BALLOON PAINTED TO LOOK LIKE A GIANT BRAIN WITH GLOWING EYES SUPER-IMPOSED OVER THE FILM! Wow, that's really... enigmatic.

When their guns prove useless to fend off their lighter-than-air attacker, the creature strikes them down with its radioactive stare of doom! Once incapacitated, the alien gray matter super imposes itself over Steve's limp form and takes control of its new home, returning to civilization, where it attempts to rape Steve's fiancée Sally, whose only major concerns are barbecuing food for her man and announcing that she's "the girl you're going to marry". Spurned by Steve's poon-to-be and scared off by a playful "attack" by Sally's dog, the blue balled Evil Steve drives back to his lab to get some rest. The brain monster super-imposes itself back out of our hero's body so it can lay out the plot for the audience. Its name is Gor, it hails from the planet Arous (pronounced “arrows” and not to be confused with the planet Arouse, which you'd probably find in a Flesh Gordon sequel), and it's come to Earth to conquer the world... and engage in some of the "exciting and rewarding" aspects of our savage Earthling lives... meaning he wants to grind his medulla oblongata all over Sally's mommy parts. Hmmm, that's gotta be a freaky porn genre just waiting to be tapped by the right enterprising young pervert! Time to file for another business loan, my friends...

Gor chose Steve for his emissary not for Sally's sweet trunk junk though, but because the man's a reputable nuclear scientist who has access to places and things that his evil braininess can use to take over the planet, no doubt so he make the place into his own sinister alien brain remake of Caligula… and it looks like “braininess” is a real word according to my spellchecker! Meanwhile Sally's called her dad to voice her concern over the strange look in Steve's eyes and the brutish turn his personality seems to have taken. Yeah, when I was a kid the same thing happened to most of my uncles. Back then we called it "Alcoholism" and tried to ignore it. Sally's pop is pretty much of the same mind, telling his daughter that Steve's "probably just got a lot on his mind right now" and that she shouldn't worry her little blond skull about it... at least not until Steve is slitting her stomach open with a broken bottle and fucking her liver in a blind Jack Daniels sex rage. Way to be a parent Mr. Sally's Dad, you should go out and have more kids just so you can do the same fine job on them that you did on dear ol’ Sal.

Try as he might, Steve-O can't seem to break the hold the Gor-meister's exerting over his will (nor the crazy ass John Agar faces he makes while doing evil), so things go from "awkward domestic abuse moment" bad to "planetary nuclear holocaust" bad when the titular monster creates a weapon that he claims will make an A-Bomb look like an M-80 in comparison! His demands? Control of the world and the creation of an intergalactic armada with which he will conquer Arous as well! While Gor's busy doing the super villain thing (like referring to himself in the third person and randomly blowing up model airplanes with his mental powers) trying to achieve what George W. Bush will no doubt manage to do by accident before he leaves office, Sally and Mr. Sally's Dad do some spelunking of their own beneath Mystery Mountain. They find the mysterious remains of Dan and... okay, forget it, I'm getting sick of the whole "mysterious" gag and it wasn't even that funny to begin with. Fuck it. Anyway, the two discover an alien brain creature of their own. This one is named Val (pronounced "vall", as in "ball") and claims that it's come to Earth as a peacekeeping force to capture the escaped Arous criminal Gor. Super-imposing himself over Sally's dog George, Val plans to hang around Steve until Gor slips out of the hunky scientist's body and a literal meeting of the minds can commence… or rather not, as the budget apparently doesn’t cover TWO big mutant brain balloons. Somehow I knew it wouldn’t be nearly as cool as the brain fight we saw in the climax of Scanners, but with at least it's still unintentionally hilarious and involves a lot of goofy looking ace violence!

Competently shot, the majority of the movie looks good and cleans up well on DVD. The problem with this type of movie though (aside from the badly written and overacted dialogue you expect from bad sci-fi movies from the '50s anyway), is that the idea behind it reaches beyond the means of its creators. Invading alien brains that possess people's bodies to carry out their struggles against each other? Great. Doing it with painted balloons, horrendous alien brain voice-over work, and terribly super-imposed images of said balloons faded over the rest of the movie? That's glorified Ed Wood territory there my friends. If you're into the campy science fiction of the atomic age though, The Brain From Planet Arous fits every bill: body snatching alien invaders, a machismo oozing scientist who calls his "helpless" little girlfriend an idiot while grinning and clenching a pipe in his big pearly whites, nuclear weapons, global conquest, panicky government officials running to the phones, stock footage of A-Bomb tests, scientific terms like "Fissure of Rolando", and acting that leaves its fair share of teeth marks in the sets. A fun way to burn an hour and a half and a perfect round of fun for the MST3K inclined among us.