Creature with the Atom Brain (1955)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Expected more

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Perhaps no other actor of the late '40s throughout the 1950s squared off against as many sci-fi monstrosities on screen as Poughkeepsie, NY-born Richard Denning. In 1948's "Unknown Island," Denning battled a T. rex and other prehistoric nightmares; in "Creature From the Black Lagoon" (1954), he grappled with the most famous amphibian in cinema history; in "Target Earth" (also from '54), his problem was invading aliens and a humongous, lumbering robot; in "The Day the World Ended" (1955), it was a marauding mutant; and in 1957's "The Black Scorpion," it was giant arachnids in a Mexican volcano. But 1954's "Gillman" was not the only title "creature" that Denning had to face, of course. In 1955's "Creature With the Atom Brain" (released in July of that year as part of a truly awesome double feature, paired with "It Came From Beneath the Sea"), the handsome, blonde, sci-fi stalwart was faced with one of his most bizarre menaces yet: remote-controlled cadavers, animated by atomic energies, that are being used by an ex-crime boss to eliminate his old enemies; a menace that almost makes dinosaurs and giant bugs seem pedestrian!In the film, Denning plays Dr. Chet Walker, the head of the police lab in a large metropolitan city. Chet's latest case is a baffling one: a string of murders perpetrated by a killer who leaves luminous fingerprints, whose blood traces show no hemoglobin content, who is seemingly impervious to bullets and who deposits a radioactive residue wherever he walks. His investigation turns even more baffling when a fingerprint analysis reveals the killers (yes, there are apparently more than one!) to be dead men; corpses that had disappeared from the local morgue! Meanwhile, in a lead-shielded house on the outskirts of the city, the viewer is allowed to see just what is going on: Deported criminal Frank Buchanan (nicely portrayed by Michael Granger) has snuck back into the country, bringing with him a new accomplice, German scientist Dr. Willhelm Steigg (Gregory Gaye). Using Steigg's remote-controlled, atomic-activated corpses ("You may be a crackpot but you're also a genius," the mobster tells him), Buchanan is systematically eliminating all his old enemies...and some new ones, as well. And Chet, it would seem, has just risen to the top of that list....An "entertainingly preposterous concoction," says Glenn Kay, writing about the film in his wonderful reference guide "Zombie Movies," and that certainly is the case here. But the film is also surprisingly intelligent and well acted, at times coming off like a film noirish policier crossed with a way-out, Saturday matinée sci-fi thriller. In truth, the film reminds this viewer of one of those old Emma Peel/"Avengers" episodes--such as "The Cybernauts," "From Venus With Love," "The Winged Avenger" and "The Positive Negative Man"--in which a madman concocts some diabolical means of offing his foes, and we see a series of attacks that take up the bulk of the hour (in the film's case, 69 minutes). "Creature" tries hard to make its outrageous premise more plausible via the use of scientific chatter; hence, we get a statement such as "a dilated solution of hematin; two absorption bands between the Fraunhofer lines," and references to "somatomotor and visceromotor effects," "selen cells" and "amygdala stimuli." The film is taut and compact, often suspenseful, and builds to a memorable conclusion, as Walker and the police do battle with a horde of the reanimated dead. The zombies here are not of the flesh-eating George A. Romero/Lucio Fulci variety, of course; they are more like remote-controlled robots than gut munchers. Still, they do look pretty impressive, with their suture-stitched foreheads (did I fail to mention the receiving gizmos that Steigg has implanted in their noggins?) and automaton gait. The film also features any number of standout sequences. I love the initial attack, in which we see one of the creatures kill somebody by breaking his back; a scene shown only in shadowed silhouette. Also memorable is the section where Chet's friend and fellow policeman Capt. Dave Harris (S. John Launer), having been turned into one of the atomic creatures by Buchanan and Steigg, arrives at Chet's house and talks with his unsuspecting wife (yummy Angela Stevens) and young daughter. And speaking of Chet's wife, nice to see the two of them enjoying a refreshingly randy and frankly sexual relationship...especially for a '50s couple! Other things to admire in the film: some crackerjack direction by Edward L. Cahn (who, over the next four years, would go on to helm such sci-fi and horror favorites as "The She-Creature," "Zombies of Mora Tau," "Voodoo Woman," "Invasion of the Saucer Men," "It! The Terror From Beyond Space," "Curse of the Faceless Man" AND "Invisible Invaders," that last boasting a plot similar to "Creature"'s, with aliens taking over the bodies of the dead), a no-nonsense script from Curt Siodmak, and noirish cinematography by DOP Fred Jackman, Jr. Sadly, the film falters a bit in its final minutes, and for the life of me, after two recent viewings, I cannot figure out how the zombified Harris turns on Buchanan at the end, or what happens to Buchanan during the final melee. And that's a shame, because for the first 65 minutes or so, the film had been quite lucid and fairly gripping. Still, these two quibbles are hardly reason to dismiss such a fun picture. For the most part, the film is aces, and should prove as stimulating to your cerebellum as a nice jolt of atomic energy....

Following a series of strange deaths across the country, a freak occurrence in the investigation leads police to a mad scientist working with a disgruntled gangster controlling reanimated dead people under their power to kill those who arrested him and must stop his deadly plot.This ended up being quite a bland and overall disappointing zombie effort. For the most part, the film remains solely on the investigation angle of the police trying to determine the cause of the strange deaths around town and interpreting the evidence left behind, running all sorts of different tests and experiments on the material and even debating what they mean for the majority of the film's running time, leaving large portions of the film completely without zombie action at all. Despite the appeal of doing so during the heyday of the 50s sci-fi monster movies running during the same time, in a horror film that type of story doesn't work for it lowers the on-screen amount of time the actual creatures take up, and that in itself is quite the opposite of what's supposed to happen in a genre-related film. Not that the zombies themselves are all that imposing, outfitted with Frankenstein-like marks around the forehead to denote an operation on their face has taken place but otherwise remain completely un-suggestive of traditional zombies or their behavior, and that remains the biggest portion of this one's problems as the lack of traditional zombie actions may make this a bitter pill to swallow for traditionalists, for the creatures are able to speak in a monotone voice, follow commands through a radio-receiver that also allows them to transmit video quality of their deeds and remain lifeless until called upon to act, so the purpose of reanimating the dead tissue for the process, a key component of zombie-lore, remains quite curious for it could've been done through hypnotized lackeys and the result is the same. Though there's some fun sequences here and there, mainly the finale as the army of creatures descends upon the military task-force assigned to take them out, there's just not enough to compound the boredom such a quick film implies.Today's Rating/PG: Violence.

With the advent of CGI, movies have become merely formulaic exercises in headache inducing and needlessly complicated special effects. This is especially true as regards the horror genre. Nowadays, directors operate under the erroneous assumption that STARTLING an audience is the equivalent of inducing tension and dread in an audience. "The Creature With The Atomic Brain" was the second part of a horror double-header with "It Came From Beneath The Sea" as the main attraction. As kids, we came to the theater to see the giant octopus. It was touted in numerous television ads,as was the custom with horror movies in the 50s. Part of the success of "The Creature With The Atomic Brain" was that we had no expectation of what was going to transpire and the plot developments presented had not as yet, in the mid-50s, become trite. This double feature was intended to get preteen kids to drag their parents to the movie theater. This we did. By 1955-1956, when this movie had its run, we had seen "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms", "Creature From The Black Lagoon", "House Of Wax", "Them". The only film that induced the same level of fear & dread in kids was "Them" because ants are everywhere and the god-awful noise the giant ants made in the the movie is replicated by engine noises emanating from ill-maintained auto engines. If you were an eight year old kid walking alone at night and you heard that peculiar warbling noise in the distance, you soiled your pants,ran home and locked the door. The atomic brain creatures were similarly fearsome because they could be anyone, anywhere. The only way to avoid them was to discern the incision scar around their foreheads and, if you saw such a scar, to haul ass out of there. This was a very minor unpretentious horror movie that succeeded in providing its juvenile audiences (and the parents they dragged along) with the delight of experiencing capably induced tension & fear.

This one's basically an update of Boris Karloff's Mad Doctor cycle of the 1930s and 1940s, many of which were actually made at Columbia. It concerns an ex-gangster teaming up with an eminent German scientist who has fallen into disrepute of late; together, they contrive to re-animate a series of dead bodies (apparently, their second life-expectancy is very short!) in order to eliminate the people involved in convicting the mobster – unsurprisingly, some of the victims end up themselves as zombies!! In this respect, the film is mildly entertaining – but, in view of the utter lack of novelty on display (the means of resuscitation may have changed but the result is the same as before), it tends to feel draggy even at a mere 69 minutes! A measure of the film's low-budget is the fact that the montage half-way through of the zombies' exploits is assembled from shots that would eventually form part of the film's very own climax! The lead here is played by lanky Richard Denning (from TARGET EARTH [1954] and THE BLACK SCORPION [1957] – neither of which I've watched) as a scientist/cop. By the way, director Cahn later made the similarly cheapskate IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958).CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN is actually the first Sam Katzman-produced horror film I've checked out – and it's one of four that were recently packaged together in Columbia's ongoing "Icons Of Horror" series of genre Box Sets; a second, THE GIANT CLAW (1957), followed this straight away…and, even if I wasn't exactly enthused with either of them, I'd still like to catch up with the remaining two titles (namely THE WEREWOLF [1956] and ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU [1957]). Incidentally, watching this I was reminded of a couple more low-brow sci-fi outings I had rented as a double-feature DVD some years back, which I might as well add to my collection at this juncture i.e. Edgar G. Ulmer's very minor THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN (1960) and the semi-interesting THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE (1962)