The Brain Eaters

Poster tagline: CRAWLING, SLIMY THINGS TERROR-BENT ON DESTROYING THE WORLD!!! Everything is bad. The filmmakers took Heinlein's novel “The Puppet Master”, deboned it and screwed-up whatever was left. The director didn't even bother with anything that could have visually refreshed all that babble. The whole film revolves around the fact that remote-controlled alien humans attach these black, slimy worms to the necks of Earthlings to bring their victims under their mental control, but even when the actors are explicitly looking at them, with amazement in their eyes, the viewer doesn't see the attached creatures because there was no budget for that. Visually, the film is quite repulsive, the camera sometimes chooses impossible angles (someone must have been playing Orson Welles), the whole set consists of one rocket, surrounded by scaffolding and several half-empty rooms, and the cherry on top are the completely unknown and unlikeable actors, who overact with gusto. Inside the spaceship, with the floating vapour, the white-bearded Methuselah and the crawling lumps with antennae, only the toughest can survive. One star for the only memorable scene, when the camera follows the gaze of a worm crawling on its victim and the viewer seems to see the surroundings through its eyes. (23.02.2013)