Charms from Beyond, Everlasting Cerebrum, and the Cult-Movie Otherworld

As double-features go, this 1962 pairing took the fur-lined teacup. (No one knows precisely what that means.) They offered much to appreciate, for those who savor uncanniness shot through with sci-fi goofiness (Star Creatures) and/or macabre concepts (Brain).

Speculation is that these cult-revered curiosities joined in common cause because other films wanted no part of them.  

Invasion of the Star Creatures

Invasion was written by Jonathan Haze, who'd played Seymour in Roger Corman's 1960 Little Shop of Horrors. Some outdoor scenes were filmed at California's Bronson Canyon. 

(As is well known to connoisseurs of 3AM TV and struggling grindhouses, Invasion was but one b/w flicker staged at Bronson Canyon. The long list includes White Zombie, Robot Monster, It Conquered the World, Teenagers From Outer Space, and Earth vs. the Spider. Too, the Bronson cave served as the Batcave entrance on 1960s TV. Holy ubiquity!) 

Army privates Philbrick and Penn --Bob Ball and Frankie Ray (Perilli) -- are crass, markedly boneheaded bunglers. They trade Noo Yawk wise-guyisms like legal-age Bowery Boys, while mishandling mundane duties, lamenting their khaki lot, and dreaming of astronaut uplift. (Diminutive Ball tends toward whininess; for his part, would-be domineering Ray sports eyebrows of Grouchoesque bounty.)

The under-used Trustin Howard, billed as Slick Slavin, bops around the base as hipster Sergeant Glory.

"Hey man, what's goin' on here," he demands of Frankie. "Like, man - what's happenin'? Like man, you're really swingin'! Where were you headed?" 

"To the Moon," Frankie replies.

"Yeah? What's playin'?"

Bob: "Where is it?" 

"What?" 

"The moon!" 

The finger-popping Glory cracks "Man, I don't know! This ain't my neighborhood!...Hey listen: Both you cats gon' be way out, if you don't get over to the colonel's office!"

"The colonel?!"

"That's right, dad! The Big Bird! The way the eagle flies! So let's get with it. 'Cause I'm your sergeant, y'know what I mean, man?! Come on, get with it!"

Glory marches them off, finger-snapping double-time.

Once inside Col. Awol's office, the sergeant intones "Okay, you men. The colonel's gonna say somethin' important!"

"Now, you men know why you're here." pompously officious (and dunder-pated) Colonel Awol struts. "No, no! 'Course you don't! How could you? Top security! I'll be brief. If there's anything I like, it's a brief briefing! No shilly shallying around, or beating around the bush! I like to set my sights on the target, take aim, and get to the point! What's the point? Oh, yes! Top secret! It concerns... concerns...Sergeant, what does it concern?"

(And yes, it's more than passing strange that Haze was assumedly paid for scripting this.)

Moving forward, Penn and Philbrick explore the cave lair of statuesque, 7-foot pin-ups Prof. Tanga and Dr. Puna -- skintight scanties-clad invaders from planet Kalar -- along with their strong-arm "Vegemen." (Extras in full-body costumes that incorporated burlap, stockings, and ping-pong-ball eyes. The get-ups may have been constructed in a fifth-grade art class.)

Tanga and Puna explain that their bark-hided and mute musclemen are organically germinated from flower pots. Plant-hands are seen gesturing from potted soil.

(In the trailer, a narrator terms them 'gigantic, man-like robots.' But no one in the film ever mentions robotics. 'Continuity Supervisor' is not a position listed in ending credits.)

The outer-space glamour scientists assert early on that they're conquering Earth to accomodate excess Kalar population. But just minutes later, they contradict that rationale by declaring they're invading to save war-happy Earth from itself -- a fairly common sci- fi film trope.

In a later moment, Puna drops the astral pin-ups' usual formal, didactic tone: "That's right, Daddy-o! You're a real square!"

Tanga explains "That was just some of the crude expressions we assimilated from one of your fellow natives."

Philbrick and Penn whirl to exchange glances: "Sergeant Glory!!"

Before and after the cave encounter, there parade basically go-nowhere sequences: A carnival-musical military march, the Three Stooges' chase-through-multiple doorways gag (adapted to inner cave gateways), and an Indian powwow. 

Sporadically popping up are references to "Space Commander Connors," and related rings/fan-club membership.

Sneaking back into the astro-lasses' lair, Philbrick and Penn go wacky with every control dial in sight, swerving the intended conquest irrevocably off discipline. (I believe the technical term is discombobulated.)

It is when the bumbling soldiers introduce kissing to the crestfallen brainy babes, though, that the conclusion is cast. (Electrical static accompanies each liplock.) 

In the final scene, the smiling four speed off in an army jeep bannered "Just Married."

(Frankie Ray Perilli went on to write for various comedians, including Lenny Bruce, whom he also managed for a time.)

The Brain That Wouldn't Die

Better living through medical madness?

Early on, young surgeon/radical experimenter Dr. Bill Cortner happens upon his fiance Jan's just-wrecked car. He wraps her decapitated head in his coat and scurries to his home lab, where he's assisted by a one-good-armed man on whom he's experimented before. 

Twisted notions churn in the windmills of Dr. Bill's mind.

Jan Cortner's head is re-animated via who-knows-what fluids fed through various tubery. Her eyes open, she beholds her ghastly circumstance. Jan immediately pleads for death's release. But the mad doctor has a warped strategy: Transplant his betrothed's skull onto another woman's body.

During that initial lab scene, Dr. Bill peers through the window of a locked lab side door. He grimaces. A hulking it-thing with grossly mishapen cranium, the sad product of a previous botched experiment, is cowering in shadows, having pounded on the door for hours. (And that pounding would become more insistent.)

Throughout much of the flick thereafter, the fever-minded medico frequents strip bars, also considering models, determined to find a female form suitable for heh-heh-heh. He even haunts the apartment camera-club of old aquaintance Doris, a facially scarred figure model. 

(One silent photographer in the scant scene is Sammy Petrillo. Together with Duke Mitchell, Petrillo had imitated Martin and Lewis in 1952's Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.)

Poor Jan stews in absolute despisal of the crackpot who'd put his own peculiar passions above her dignity. She establishes a telepathic link with the as-yet unseen wretch behind the locked side door. A bizarre kinship evolved.

The bad doctor lures camera-club figure-model Doris to his home, with promises to rectify her scarring. He surreptitiously drugs her, though, scheming scalpel deviltry

Conclusive minutes then fly past, staggering imagery their baggage. Jan and the beastly practitioner trade shouts; the two-legged botchman bashes the locked door into splinters, setting on bloody rampage; and the entire lab bursts into conflagration. 

(In a rare positive moment, the freed grotesquerie carries sedated Doris to safety - the beast proving beauty's savior.)

With apologies to Burns, even the best-laid plans of mice and madmen...

Readers curious as to whether Invasion of the Star Creatures or The Brain That Wouldn't Die received any organization's Best Picture trophy can research independently. I've neither the time nor inclination. Besides, scholarship can get in the way of a good time.

Invasion of the Star Creatures Trailer

Star Creatures Teaching kissing clip (1:56)

a bucket of blood trailer

Phantom A.D. song video "The Brain That Wouldn't Die"

Corman's a bucket of blood morbid whimsy                    

Detritus auteur Roger Corman, infamous cobbler of zero-budget trash-classics, splashed a bucket of blood onto silver screens in 1959. By that action, he bridged the chasm between 1940s/'50s suspense and 1970s blood-sprays.

Tilted and unsettling, a bucket of blood surely stands alone amongst celluloid spectacles in imposing opportunities to hoot lustily at Beat-Generation pretensions, and suddenly bolt erect at atrocities sprung from the insecurities and pathetic aspirations obsessing an awkwardly bent bohemian brainpan.

"I will talk to you of art," a bearded Beat poet recites to coffee-house kookaburras, in a semi-comatose monotone. "For there is nothing else to talk about. For there is nothing else. Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Burn gas, buggies, and whip your sour cream of circumstance, and hope. Go ahead and sleep your bloody heads off...What is not creation is graham crackers."

A saxophonist noodles Jazz at the hirsute nut's side, as slouching patrons of the bad paintings-bedecked hipster hangout posture studiously.

It is this mileau that dithery, pain-featured busboy Walter (actor Dick Miller) aches to be one of the 'in crowd.'  As the tale advances, the sadsack kills and kills again -- initially inadvertently, and horrified by his unintended perpetration. 

Frustrated to the point of emergent madness, though, by his utter lack of sculpting faculty, Walter hits on a scheme: plaster cadavers in modeling clay, and parade them as objets d'art.   

His deceit temporarily accomplishes its mission. Much applause and celebration are lavished on the mousy plate-shlepper. He soon dons outlandish gear and puts on ten and twenty dogs.

(A word on coffee house The Yellow Door: Its garbagy furnishings may well have come from Montgomery Weird. The ambiance is one of calculated misfitism. And the two-legged curiosties sipping java and lauding Beardo's free-verse gobbledygook are to ridicule.)

The cafe's beret-wearing, walking-stick-wielding proprieter eventually catches on to Walter's unspeakable actuality. So do undercover cops who've camouflaged themselves as copycat scenesters. (One masked blue-boy, who Walter later refashions as arty attraction, is played by future game show ringleader Bert Convy.)

During an evening exhibition of Walter's works (there are by this time several dried-clay corpora delecti), the grisly charade becomes apparent, and the chase is on. 

In a twinkling, beatniks who'd effectively hoisted him on shoulders only minutes previous, pursued the little cretin. Howls of just-add-water fury disturbed darkness. 

The manner in which Walter forever escapes both the bohemian mob and justice will not be disclosed here. There is a lonely rope involved -- engage your imaginations.

a bucket of blood was hardly the first Roger Corman / Dick Miller collaboration. The pair had joined shoulders a reported 14 times previously. Miller played a soldier in the director's It Conquered the World (1956), and turned up as a policeman in 1979 flick Rock 'n' Roll High School. 

His one line, in his one Rock 'n' Roll High School scene: "These Ramones are ugly, ugly people!"