THE BRAIN EATERS (1958)
Article #505 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 8-2-2002
Posting date: 12-26-2002

The appearance of a strange metallic object in a ravine near a small town coincides with a strange wave of murders and disappearances.

Bruno VeSota directed this unauthorized adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s “The Puppet Masters”; I’ve not read the book, so I can’t do a real comparison. VeSota adds a certain dark atmosphere to the proceedings, but the story is a mess; I don’t know whether the problem was in the original script, in the editing, or if certain scenes were never filmed, but the movie feels jumpy and unfinished, almost as if they stopped filming before they were complete and just edited what they had together. And if the music sounds too good to have been composed for the film, it wasn’t; it was a classical piece by Shostakovich. There are some good ideas in this movie, but I don’t know if they were original to the script or from the Heinlein novel. And though I couldn’t spot Leonard Nimoy visually, I definitely recognized his voice when he appeared.