Synopsis:

There are bad 50's Sci-Fi movies and then there are BAD 50's Sci-Fi movies. The Brain from Planet Arous definitely falls into the latter category. It's so bad it's funny! An invisible spaceship crashes into the side of a mountain. Two nuclear scientists go to investigate the source of the crash and are overcome by a floating transparent brain with…eyes. What's worse, it talks too. (snicker) The brain kills one of the men to demonstrate it's power and possesses the body of the other so that it can take over the world. But not before it attempts to have sex with the living doctor's girlfriend. Evidently, being a brain without a body has some serious sexual drawbacks. So now we have a horny disembodied brain occupying the body of a scientist intent on conquering the world. Still with me? Believe me, it gets better. The Mad er um, crazy brain is an escaped convict who fled his homeworld in the hopes of finding suitably mentally shallow hosts to aide in the fulfillment of his mad dream! A second brain sent to return him to confinement advises the humans of his plan and embodies the family dog so as to have a better look at the action. The errant brain takes full advantage of the primitive humans by creating all manner of havoc from blowing up planes in flight to recreating the devastating effects of a nuclear detonation. Comically, the mad brains' run comes to an end at the point of an axe in an extremely funny segment at the end of the movie! Is this movie all bad, absolutely. The comic relief is not even worth watching this turd of a movie.

Audio/Video:

The audio for the film is presented in a very disappointing mono platform. All of the information is squeezed through the center channel and the resultant effect is not all that bad in and of itself. Obviously, given the platform, there is no depth of field, surround effect or LFE involvement. There is an annoying repetitive issue regarding the effect used to simulate the space brain's speech. At times it garbles the speech and makes it almost impossible to understand. Cranking the audio does not help the situation. If possible, it actually makes the audio worse.

The video is presented in a full frame B&W format. For the most part the image is clean but not striking. In the latter chapters, the image is filled with all kinds of errors. The normal errors like flecks or pixellation are present and then a whole new batch of errors pops up. From tape across the screen to deep scratches, the video is rife with all kinds of transfer mistakes. Given the age of the film and the fact that it's such an awful movie, it's probably not on the top of anyone's list regarding maintenance to maintain a pristine copy for a DVD release. So chalk it up to failings in the source material and you have your answer for the reason the image is so poor.

Extras:

The extras for the disc are five trailers for other similarly bad sci fi films from the 50's. Namely, Carnival of Souls, The incredibly laughable Robot Monster, Teenagers from Outer Space, The Giant from the unknown and Cosmic Man. These trailers are all accessible by clicking on the "cosmic" logo on the main menu page. The trailer for the film is also included.

Overall:

This is just one of those movies that started off badly and got worse. I love campy 50's Sci Fi but this is far too "Plan 9 from Outer Space" for me. If you can imagine an awful movie that stinks to high heaven then you are probably thinking about this movie. Admittedly, at the end of the film, I was in stitches as the alien was clubbed to death but other than that I was in sheer and utter pain. Skip it