"I'm here and I want action!" - The Brain Eaters

In a 1958 film directed by Bruno VeSota for Roger Corman's American International Pictures, a mysterious spate of killings in a small town in Illinois begins with the sudden appearance of what is initially taken to be an alien spacecraft. There is even mention of sightings of a flaming chariot in the sky, recalling the Biblical tale of Elijah. 

It eventually transpires, however, that the small bug-like creatures, which have begun attaching themselves parasitically to the local populace and taking over their brains, are not extraterrestrials but antediluvian throwbacks to the carboniferous period. Their craft has not fallen down from the sky but tunneled up from the earth after 200 million years beneath the surface, here to offer the planet's current residents the "gift" of a "utopia" based on logic and universal harmony - by force, if necessary. Intriguingly, their fifty-foot-tall, spiral transport bears an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Tatlin's famous monument to the third international.

The creatures - which were apparently handmade by producer Ed Nelson himself using some old wind-up toys, a bit of fur from an old coat, and two pipe cleaners - work systematically, taking over the brains of the local government, the police, and finally the media. It is at this point, when we realise the local radio producer is also One Of Them, that the identity of composer "Tom Jonson" - a man with no other IMDB credits apart from this film - is brought rather sharply into question by a rather glaring needle-drop from the third act vorspiel to Tristan und Isolde. 

The plot was considered sufficiently similar to a Robert Heinlein novel called The Puppet Masters to justify an out of court settlement. But Heinlein's novel is set in a far future 2007, several years after a nuclear war and amidst continued tension between opposing East and West powers. In Heinlein's novel the creatures are aliens - from Titan, one of Saturn's moons - but their resemblance to slugs and the way they attach themselves to their human hosts at the base of the necks makes the link pretty close.  In Robert Rodriguez's film, The Faculty, one of the characters notes that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a "blatant rip off" of this novel of Heinlein's.

There is a very peculiar atmosphere all the way through this film. The strange gaps in logic and continuity combine with an excessive use of dry ice, dutch angles, and often superfluous voice-over to leave the film teetering precariously between Ed Wood-esque unintentional self-parody and a genuinely dream-like driftwork. Director VeSota worked mostly as an actor and ended up playing a series of barmen in various TV westerns. But three years before The Brain Eaters he had written and directed (uncredited) one of the strangest films of the fifties: the dialogue-free noir thriller, Dementia, for which George Antheil provided one of his very best film scores.

The latter film was banned by the New York Board of Censors until the year Brain Eaters was released, three years later, when it limped out with meagre distribution, a poor substitute soundtrack, and an entirely pointless voice-over explaining what's going on at every step. It slowly developed a place in cult fandom, however, thanks firstly to being the picture being shown in the cinema in The Blob, and, much later, a glowing review in the RE/Search Incredibly Strange Films issue. It seems the whole thing is now available to watch on YouTube.

"Sounds like a woman. . . Or a monster!" : Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet

Midway through watching the Roger Corman produced space adventure, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965, dir. Curtis Harrington), one develops an increasingly odd sensation: the effects seem strangely dated for the year (even for a low budget film), the plot weirdly disconnected, like a series of events strung together with little sense of development - strands are built up, as though they are about to lead somewhere, and then just peter out. And why is the voice-dubbing so off? And is that Russian writing on the side of the spaceship?

Indeed, almost the only thing holding it all together is Ronald Stein's equally uncanny music. Stein was assistant musical director St. Louis Municipal Opera in the early fifties, and married the opera singer Harlene Hiken (who provided the singing voice of Audrey Dalton in a western of the same year, called The Bounty Killer). For several years, Stein served alongside Les Baxter as staff composer at American International Pictures, but though they share credits on numerous films, Baxter claims they never met. With its silken exotica and fleeting electronics, Stein's music for Prehistoric Planet could almost be mistaken for Baxter's at times.

It turns out, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet was almost entirely composed of footage from an earlier soviet film, Planeta Bur ('Planet of Storms') from 1962, with the story recomposed and scenes re-arranged with the help of a couple of extra scenes starring Basil Rathbone (who would star alongside Dennis Hopper in Harrington's vampires in space flick, Queen of Blood, released the following year). Planeta Bur was directed by Pavel Klushantsev, who shot to fame in Russia when his (1958) Doroga K zvezdam ('Road to the Stars') happened to coincide with the launch of Sputnik.

It doesn't end there though, for the same footage was used one further time, in 1968's debut feature from Peter Bogdanovich (under the alias Derek Thomas), Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, with Rathbone now replaced with Howard Hughes's former squeeze, Mamie van Doren. Prehistoric Planet now reveals itself as the incoherent, "primordially repressed" middle part of a three-stage fantasy, as in Freud's 'A Child is Being Beaten' - caught between the hard SF of the original Soviet film, and the explicit sexual fantasy of the Bogdanovich version.

In this context, we can now begin to make sense of one of the most troubling aspects of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet: the suggestive, disembodied voice the astronauts keep hearing as they explore Venus, a tremulous electronic portamento which, as one of the men remarks, "Sounds like a woman. . . or a monster!" Throughout the story, this voice teases the astronauts and audience alike, one constantly expects it to lead somewhere - but it never does. We never really discover its source as the story just sort of peters out. Absent entirely from the original Russian film, and only finally embodied in the third version - here it remains a perfect example of one of Melanie Klein's disembodied partial objects, haunting the spectral soundtrack of the film, and somehow all the more alluring for it. Like a leitmotif from Tristan and Isolde, it constantly resists resolution - to the point of a sado-masochistic impulse that cannot fully annunciate itself, precisely as in the repressed middle term, "Father is beating me."