The Brain from Planet Arous

This movie rocks. It is so bad, it should be in detention, along with the Not Man and a pile of old Anthrax vinyls. It has John Agar playing a guy who gets possessed by a floating brain on a fishing line that’s superimposed over the action, which is slam-bang and includes demonically (or extraterrestrially) possessed doggies and attempted rape. And guys get murdered too—by being radiated to death, where they just lay around looking like some old stiff covered in Halloween store silly putty because some horny mother from "Planet Arous" has to take over the world or something. Some guys got all the luck, hold all the cards, and still decide they need more. What can I say? It's human (and floating monster movie brain) nature.

So we start off with John Agar as "Steve" and some other clown named Dan (said clown played by Robert Fuller) at some outpost in the desert, where an alien spacecraft UFO crash-lands, and they go out and go into some cave at "Mystery Mountain." And if we put on our thinking cap, the subtext here is that they explore the subconscious mind—relegated as a series of caves—and find a floating, evil "superbrain" (the Id) rising up from the recesses below to possess the Ego (John Agar), and thus becoming a metaphor for that buried secret self, that primitive, atavistic Real Self Beast Within that seeks to dominate, to destroy. And that Self, which is undeniably a White Male unapologetic capitalist-class imperialist pig-dog, gets horny and salivates all over his fiancée while she cluelessly barbecues and cooks A LOT of meat (these people seem thoroughly keto-friendly).

Joyce Meadows video interview The Brain From Planet Arous! Without Your Head Podcast

But that's alien floating brain Gor, who has a pair of glowing eyes. Another alien, named Vol, has come to Earth to capture Gor, and possess John Agar's doggie George. His uncle—or whatever—who is another scientist, gets wise to this, and his fiancée Sally (Joyce Meadows) is worried because "You've become a real caveman, Steve," and so he has. Dude's hornier than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous and Spanish Fly.

Gor is an evil alien mastermind who’s got nothing better to do than blow airplanes into a snowstorm of confetti with the power of his telekinetic comic book villain brain, all the while laughing maniacally as his eyes become big, wall-eyed, black-silvery things that are quite frighteningly fetching. He calls together the leaders of the world (who can all fit around a cheap dining table in a backroom somewhere) and demonstrates his airplane-to-confetti supervillain powers. It turns out Gor is going to arrogantly (yes, he's very arrogant) take over the world and force his puny human underling slaves to create rockets so he can go back to his homeworld and… I'm not certain what he plans to do after that, but whatever it is, it can't possibly bode well for us—you and me.

So his fiancée turns up at the lab, and Vol has possessed the doggie, and the uncle or brother-in-law scientist John (Thomas Browne Henry) or whatever dies, and Gor can only be stopped by somebody bold enough to whack his "fissure of Rolando" (whatever the hell that is), and he has to come up for air anydamnway, and so... and so...

On the whole—and I hate to give away so many spoilers—my spirit guide directed me to emerge from the dark realm of my earthly slumber to watch The Brain from Planet Arous, chiefly because I liked the title, and clips from it featured prominently in the "Brains" segment of the forgotten Eighties anthology film It Came From Hollywood, which starred Dan Aykroyd as a brain butcher at a brains meat counter, as well as Gilda Radner, Cheech and Chong, and John Candy in various themed segments. A floating alien brain complete with glowing eyes and dangling brain stem is always going to get my pulse racing and my pecker poppin’.

That it is simply a thinly-veiled critique of imperialism, capitalism, heteronormative patriarchal oppression, blatant colonialism, Zionism, and other isms too numerous to even recount is just icing on the oozing alien cake (which is probably baked in butter and made of BRAINS).

Keep watching the skies.

And your mouth.

THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS (1957) | Full Movie 🎬 HD

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