The Brain From Planet Arous (1957)

A movie that proves the brain is the most important sex organ--in that it's kind of a dick.

The Brain From Planet Arous (1957)
Directed by Nathan Juran (as Nathan Hertz)
Written by Ray Buffum

One of the lens flares from J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek crash lands on Richard Dreyfuss’ mashed potato mountain from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and startles John Agar, whom we’ve apparently caught on his day off, as he’s engrossed in curating his large vintage toaster collection.

But John can’t relax, because he keeps picking up mysterious radioactivity readings on his waffle iron, so he decides to cross the room to bitch at Robert Fuller, who tries to hide behind a magazine and just wait until it’s the Seventies so he can star in Emergency! But John demands that Robert come out of there and act with him, so together they determine that this radiation is so mysterious, it could only have come from one place: Mystery Mountain.

Joyce Meadows, last seen being strangled to death by Jack Elam in The Girl in Lovers Lane, has an even more depressing role in this film (she’s John girlfriend) and gamely drops by to declare that she has to make them lunch, because vagina. John and Robert scarf down burgers with Joyce’s father, who’s there primarily to panhandle spare exposition, then they load their Jeep with pith helmets and drive into the blistering desert to check out this “hot blast of gamma.” Should I stop here and make the obligatory “sounds like a Japanese bukkake video starring the Incredible Hulk” joke, or can we all just stipulate to the monster semen gag and move on?

Let’s move on. Our heroes drive into the desolate and remote nuclear proving grounds of Griffith Park, where they pretend John's blow dryer is a Geiger counter and explore Bronson Cave, in a scene that would be really suspenseful if I wasn’t so distracted by John’s incredibly extensive network of sweat stains, which change from shot to shot like Rorschach’s mask in Watchmen.

Suddenly, they’re accosted by a large, brain-shaped Happy Birthday balloon. Robert is shocked, but he’s also a scientist, and with the curiosity typical of his profession, asks, “What is it?” John, on the other hand, just bugs his eyes out and fires wildly at it with a .45. Their teamwork proves that it is indeed possible to reconcile the Scientific Method with Republican Party doctrine.

The Brain flashes his headlights, which causes John to stagger around like Fred Sanford faking a heart attack, then it sits on his sweaty chest and makes him say “Uncle” or “Medulla Oblongata”, or whatever floats its lobe.

A week passes. Joyce is worried and tells her father that she’s leading a group of men on a rescue mission to Mystery Mountain, but first she has to make them lunch. Just then, John shows up and tongue-kisses her so aggressively she nearly faints from passion. Or disgust. Actually, I think it’s an artful combination—the character is overwhelmed, while the actress is clearly repulsed.

Joyce notices that Robert didn’t come back from the desert with John, and asks him, basically, “Say, you didn’t get possessed by a big, superimposed brain balloon in Bronson Canyon, did you?” John is coy, and tries to allay her suspicions by throwing her down on the chaise lounge, kissing her like a drunken frat boy, and tearing her blouse off one shoulder. (On a side note, this is the second film I’ve seen Joyce Meadows in, and the second film in which she's had a blouse torn off her shoulder. Maybe it’s a coincidence, or maybe this was her signature bit, like that popping noise Fritz Feld made with his mouth. I’ll have to check to see if it also happens in that 1987 episode she did of Punky Brewster.)

Fortunately, Joyce’s dog comes to her rescue. John leaves in a huff and goes back to his lab, where he sits down and proceeds to sweat, grimace, twitch, and jiggle so violently he looks like a death row inmate in the electric chair just as the Executioner realizes he hit the wrong switch and accidentally turned on the Magic Fingers feature.

John chats up the Brain, who reveals that his name is Gor, and like most things called Gor¹, he’s into bondage and rough sex. But he’s not only going to use John’s moist, unattractive body to create a hostile work environment, he's also going to lay waste some capital cities and conquer the world.

Joyce’s dad goes to the lab, where he tells John that he looks terribly, terribly sick, and should come over immediately for lunch. John responds by making goofy funhouse faces in the water cooler, then pops in a couple of creepy contact lenses—the universal sign for “I’m Possessed”—and starts screaming. I would too; they look painful.

Joyce talks her dad into driving out to Bronson Canyon. They enter the dark cave, but where John wet his pants and ran, leaving his friend to die, Joyce fearlessly tracks the radioactive signal to its source, and barely flinches at the sight of Robert’s corpse.

They meet Vol, a cop-brain from the planet Arous. He was given just 24 hours to track down the criminal-brain, Gor, or it'll mean his badge! Which might not be a bad thing, since the badge is pinned to his Olfactory Bulb, and it's making him hallucinate the smell of toast.

John announces plans to party-crash an atom bomb test, then he does a jerky, Joe Cocker thing while Gor floats nearby, laughing lustily and calling him “stupid.”

Vol shows up at Joyce’s house and explains that he needs to arrest Gor while he’s outside his host, since Arous doesn’t have an extradition treat with John’s sweaty dad bod. He also needs a host of his own. Joyce and her dad both bravely volunteer, until he explains what it involves, then they get squicked out and say, “Oh, uh, maybe you should possess our dog instead.”  Vol sighs, but agrees to occupy Sandy, the Anti-Molestation Mutt. Now he’s an alien cop on Earth disguised as a dog, which would make for a great black-and-white Japanese cartoon series from the 1960s². Just sayin’.

But just as Joyce’s pet becomes a brain, John’s brain plans some heavy petting with Joyce. First, he’ll put on a nice suit. Then he’ll pull over to the side of the road and make a badly superimposed airplane explode. With his mind! Then maybe they’ll go dancing.

Vol says they mustn’t make Gor suspicious—Joyce must treat John the same way she always does. She agrees, and when John arrives she chirps, “Ready to go, Master?” So maybe that whole BDSM thing wasn’t actually Gor’s idea…

They take the dog to Lover’s Lane (I don’t know why; maybe they played that Chinese fortune cookie game with dog food jingles—“My dog’s better than your dog…in bed”), and John-Gor gets aggressively kissyface. When Joyce rebuffs him, he turns self-conscious and makes awkward small talk, basically telling her his entire plan for world conquest in excruciating detail.  Then he maneuvers her onto a chaise-like rock and prepares to tear the blouse off her shoulder again, apparently thinking that human sexual intercourse begins and ends with a targeted exposure of the glenohumeral joint. What do you want to bet that back in school, Gor totally tanked his Xenobiology finals?

“I want you! And what I want, I take!” he snarls, thereby sacrificing all the good will he’d previously built up by pretending to be someone other than John Agar. Fortunately, this skin-crawling scene is broken up the heroic barking of Detective Dog.

They hear a radio bulletin about the plane John-Gor blew up with his brain, and Joyce convinces him to drive out to the crash site and see if he can help. Once there, however, all he does is stand around and gloat, so she goes home and complains to her dad that it was the worst date she’s ever had—including that time at Junior Prom when Tommy Matthews got drunk on a mixture of cooking sherry and Sun Drop soda and puked on her dress at the Dairy Queen.

Vol reveals that alien brains have to turn solid every 24 hours in order to assimilate oxygen and cheap plot devices, and when that happens, Joyce can kill Gor with a sharp blow to his “Fissure of Rolando,” assuming she bothers to do the minimum amount of due diligence and figure out where this vulnerable spot is located, which she doesn’t.

The Sheriff drops by John’s lab to accuse him of murdering Robert, but John-Gor roasts him. With his mind! Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs learn the plane was destroyed by an unearthly force, and realize we’ve been invaded by aliens. But that’s fine, because we ourselves want to “invade the moon,” so maybe we can find these visitors “and work with them.” Sure, they killed a hundred innocent people, but we’re already employing Nazi war criminals, so at least they’ll all have something to chat about in the break room.

John-Gor goes to the nuclear test, where the military has built a fake town to measure the blast effects, and blows it up prematurely. With his MIND! Then he cackles evilly, probably because he noticed that Dr. Indiana Jones survived the blast by hiding inside a refrigerator, and even to a being from a planet populated by semi-gaseous brains that just linger in the air like a silent but deadly fart, that’s hilariously stupid.

John-Gor comes back to Joyce’s and falls asleep on her chaise lounge, and Vol reveals that Gor is now helpless. Joyce asks, “Oh, you mean I should whack him in the Fistula of Orlando?” and finally decides to quit procrastinating and pull down the Encyclopedia Americana, Volume B.  But she gets distracted by the entry on Bullfinches, and the moment passes.

John-Gor goes to a meeting of all the major nations, does his airliner-blowing-up act again, and the whole world promptly surrenders to him like a total puss.

Joyce decides to pass the buck, and just leaves the torn-out encyclopedia page on John’s desk, with the words “Gor’s Achilles Heel” and a big arrow scrawled on it. It’s a stupid plan, and works perfectly; Gor evacuates John, John sees the brain diagram, then glances meaningfully at his axe. But Joyce screws it all up by bumping into the Sheriff’s corpse and screaming her head off (even though she’d remained perfectly calm at the sight of Robert’s dead body, and he was a personal friend and frequent lunch patron).

John grabs his axe (every physics lab has one. Well, every good physics lab) and starts flailing away. He never gets close to the alien brain’s Ficus of Mongo, but since it's just a painted balloon on a string and can only take so much punishment, the body-snatching invader eventually gets its implied off-screen desserts.

So: happy ending, right, with John back to being the patronizing dick he always was. Unfortunately, Vol has vacated the dog and gone back to his own planet (where he will later be killed three days short of retirement, forcing his rookie partner to go undercover as a cat), which means there’s no space alien left to corroborate John’s story that he was infested with brain balloons.  There’s also the little matter that John is legally culpable for downing civilian airliners, frying local law enforcement, and killing about a division worth of troops, all in front of witnesses. Of course, the world did just surrender to him, so if I were in John’s place I’m not sure I’d immediately go back to the global leaders I’d terrorized and announce, “Hey guys, good news! I’m regular ol' me again! Totally free of super-powerful aliens, and vulnerable to any—”

(SFX: Sounds of multiple overlapping GUNSHOTS from every corner of the room).

Instead, I think I'd rather see a sequel about John, now king of the world but totally powerless, and his frantic, zany efforts to maintain his guise of omnipotence—sort of a sci-fi Moon Over Parador.

So what would you guys do if an alien brain used your body and its kaleidoscopic array of sweat stains to conquer the earth, and then left you holding the bag?

1. From Wikipedia: Gor (/ˈɡɔːr/) is the fictional setting for a series of sword and planet novels written by philosophy professor John Lange, writing as John Norman…According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Norman's "sexual philosophy" is "widely detested".

2. The 1965 series The Amazing 3 (AKA Wonder 3), based on an Osamu Tezuka manga, had basically the same plot—three alien agents arrive on earth and go incognito as farm animals: a bunny, a duck, and a horse. I’ll just note for fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that the aliens’ leader, the rabbit, was voiced by actress Bobbie Byers, who played horny cycle slut Linda in The Wild Rebels (1967). I mean, say what you like about her choice of material, but the woman had range.